]]>The Belgian city of Ghent plays host to a broad range of projects and initiatives around the commons. But it has yet to adopt a model which really places a commons-focused approach and logic at the core of its institutions and processes. Recent work undertaken by experts on the commons provides a roadmap for the city to re-imagine and reconfigure its structures around citizen participation, the sharing of resources, and ‘translocal’ cooperation.

Michel Bauwens, one of the world’s experts on the commons and founder of the P2P Foundation, distinguishes at least three main reasons why cities would want to stimulate initiatives and projects related to the commons. First, these play an important role in the ecological transition, they allow for goods, workshops, and infrastructures to be shared. Second, they enable a faster transfer to a circular economy by sharing information about production chains, in addition to offering opportunities for local jobs and meaningful labour. And instead of outsourcing everything to private companies working with long supply chains, communal knowhow and coordination platforms allow the realisation of shorter supply and distribution chains. And finally, as the commons are based on open systems, they strengthen democracy and participation. What is still missing, however, in Ghent and elsewhere, is the ‘maker city’ model of the commons, namely a production model based on open design.

A strong commons commitment

Ghent, a city of 260,000 residents in Belgium, has a remarkable history of citizen initiatives and other forms of self-governance. In the Middle Ages it was a big, wealthy city with over 50 guilds. During the industrial revolution it was the cradle of new labour movements and cooperatives. For some ten years now there has been a third wave of activity, now comprising over 500 citizen initiatives, ranging from an energy cooperative and a digital citizens’ platform for car-sharing, to numerous local food initiatives.

At the political level, Ghent has a tradition of progressive parties, with a relatively large Green Party that has been on the scene for the last few decades. In the 2012 local election, a red-green ‘cartel list’ won the majority in the town council. It has been governing the city together with the Liberal Party on the basis of an innovative social-ecological city project. The progressive tradition translates into an open culture of policy-making, leaving Ghent’s 4,000 municipal workers quite some leeway to develop initiatives of their own and interact with citizens. All the same, Belgian cities’ scope for policy-making, as well as their fiscal autonomy, is limited compared to a country like Denmark.

It is therefore no coincidence that Ghent city council, witnessing the proliferation of citizen initiatives, is the first city in the world to ask Michel Bauwens to devise a Commons Transition Plan for Ghent. Bauwens and his colleague settled in Ghent in the spring of 2017, talked to 80 Ghent commoners (citizens leading or involved in projects around the commons), held a survey on the nature of the commons and the role of the city, and interviewed various municipal services and town councillors. This resulted in a wiki of some 500 documented citizen initiatives.

The aim however was not just to map projects, as the research question was twofold and of a political nature. It first looked at the potentially new facilitating and regulating relationship between the local Ghent government and citizens to enhance the development of commons initiatives. It then asked if cities can be actors in social, economic, and institutional change at a time when nation-states are no longer capable of regulating the transnational economy. Can networks of cities be part of a new transnational governance model?

On the basis of research into the commons in numerous cities, Bauwens, for the purpose of his Commons Transition Plan, starts from two premises. First, the town council, the commons citizen initiatives, and quite a number of Ghent’s residents are no longer purely local actors. They have become part of transnational and translocal networks, which together can exert influence on socio-economic changes worldwide. This is demonstrated notably in up-and-coming ‘global design communities’. Local projects such as fab labs[1] are connected to global fab lab information flows, communities, and sometimes even coalitions. Second, cities can more consciously manage the way they cooperate. There are already examples in the field of climate policy or the regulation of Uber, but this can be taken much further. International coalitions of cities should be true institutions for translocal and global cooperation.

Will you be my partner (city)?

Appreciating commons initiatives is one thing, organising as a local government so as to offer structural support is quite another. This requires a fundamental shift in the culture and structure of government, for which Bauwens uses the concept of the ‘Partner State’, here transposed to the city as local government. The city is then no longer a territory which needs politicians behaving as managers; it is, first and foremost, a living community of creative citizens. This means that instead of privatising businesses or outsourcing to public-private partnerships, the aim is the development of public-civil partnerships.

In order to make Ghent a Partner City, Bauwens starts from what already exists in the city in terms of transition policy. In the context of its broader climate policy, Ghent for some years has known Gent en Garde(Ghent and whisk), a sustainable food system strategy for the city. The central organ within this transition strategy is the Voedselraad (Food Council), bringing together all food chain stakeholders, hence consolidating the many existing and new initiatives around local food and the so-called short supply chains and bringing producers and consumers into contact with each other.

The Food Council, as the representative organ, also seats people within vested structures, who cannot or do not want to negotiate on an equal footing with the new commons initiators. That’s why a second organ is needed, the contributive organ, which in this case is the existing working group on urban agriculture. This independent working group itself is a coalition of various urban agriculture projects, experts, and committed citizens. It allows for the mobilisation of expertise in civil society in a power-neutral way.

Based on this existing structure and to boost civil participation, the Commons Transition Plan can help found two new institutions. First, the States-General of the Commons, organised by sector and acting as an umbrella. This is a platform designed for citizens who care for the commons and are committed to them. The second organ is the Chamber of the Commons, analogous to the existing Chamber of Commerce. In this Chamber, citizens sit as entrepreneurs, committed to the resilience and future of the commons economy.

The difference in perspective makes both institutions indispensable. By striving in this twofold way for more voice and influence, the contributive organ gains strength in its dialogue with the representative organ and the city. They make sure that there is cocreation and they erect a barrier against any long term encapsulation caused by policy-making. The whole scheme can be rolled out for many other sectors, with the public authorities being fed constantly by commons initiatives and ideas.

In addition to this, Bauwens proposes to copy successful institutions from Italian cities such as Bologna. First, a Commons City Lab, to support fresh, experimental commons initiatives, to devise commons agreements, and to disseminate successful initiatives and models. Second, the commons regulations, which endorse the right to initiate commons orientated projects and regulate the supportive role of cities and other urban actors. The ‘Right to Initiate’ is a positive right which is not aimed at the replacement of public services, but harbours the values of ‘care’ and ‘reform’.

Where the currents meet

It is a striking fact that whether it is about stimulating the commons or regulating the hyper-capitalist Airbnbs of this world, cities are taking the lead. So it’s London rather than the British government that has the nerve to take action against Uber if it violates existing rules. Cities being in the vanguard is no coincidence. Even if there are more reasons at play, the fact that a local council is more easily approachable for citizens than a national government certainly has something to do with it; conversely, for a mayor it is easier to engage local actors in policy-making.

This pragmatic response, however, conceals an ideological aspect, which in my book Vrijheid & Zekerheid (Freedom and Certainty) I describe as the ‘Land of Two Currents’.[2] In Europe there is both a dominant neoliberal main current and an alternative countercurrent. The main current is formed by most national governments, international institutions, and big corporations. National governments find themselves in the straitjacket of the Maastricht Treaty values (placing monetary objectives before social and ecological ones). Urban governments have more autonomy in that sense; it is simply impossible for lobbyists of large corporations to be present in every city. The city is the place where a multitude of sustainable citizen initiatives start and, like small streams feeding into a larger river, come together to strengthen each other. It’s mostly the local governance level – which is closest to the citizens – which joins this undercurrent. It’s also the place where local alternatives can successfully develop into a real political alternative. The election of Ada Colau as mayor of Barcelona, running on the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú, is an illustration of how this can take place.

Joining forces

If cities want to be an active part of a novel form of transnational governance, then they have to actively found multi-city commons coalitions. This is at the same time a pragmatic proposal: as commoners and entrepreneurs take initiatives and create local standards, the need increases to make them strong enough and allow them to operate in a classical profit-orientated environment, which shifts social and ecological cost (externalities) onto society. Cities and the commons initiatives can only attain real relevance when they succeed in pooling their knowhow and infrastructure. Jointly, cities might for example support the development of open source software platforms allowing the setting-up of working commons systems for, say, car-sharing and bicycle-sharing, minting complementary coins, or the management of food production in short-chain agriculture, from seeds to online sales.

Part of this will mean sharing knowhow about the commons approach in various towns and cities. Then we can see which regulations and new institutions work most effectively in supporting commons initiatives. As a useful example, Bauwens refers to the coalition of 16 large cities signing the Barcelona Pledge and its FabCity model, which aims at relocalising half of the production of food by 2054.

The new translocal horizon

The importance of the Commons Transition Plan that Michel Bauwens devised for Ghent clearly transcends its local character. The new institutional structures that Bauwens proposes, in particular, are of crucial importance. It is clear that after a ten-year increase in citizen initiatives, Ghent needs new structures to channel this energy so as to change society and its economy in the direction of a more honest, sustainable, and shared future. All the proposed innovations at the city level will absorb a lot of time and energy from local commoners, governments, and generative entrepreneurs. There is a big danger here of everyone recognising the importance of the expansion of translocal networks, but not getting round to making them a reality. In his plan, Bauwens mentions the need for the translocal networks in addition to what has to happen in the city itself. It would be important to anchor the translocal aspect in every new institution from the start.

However, more cooperation is necessary to develop the counter-current needed. Essential in this respect are networks of cities cooperating with university networks to develop and share the necessary knowledge and design. If tomorrow 20 towns and cities allocate funds to develop, say, a digital platform for an alternative ‘Fairbnb’, and then implement it in cooperation with the urban commons actors, then there is real political leverage by a countercurrent against the neoliberal actors. That is the real struggle we are facing and the lesson to be drawn from the 1970s. In those days there was also, from the energy of what today we refer to as ‘May 68’, a broad spectrum of civilian actions and initiatives, staking a claim to more space for citizen autonomy in relation to government and economy. If this space was won in the field of, say, new rights (gay marriage, flexible career options, euthanasia…) in a number of countries, then in the field of the economy the reverse has happened – citizens have lost ground.

By organising globally, the power of the business sector has grown far above and beyond both that of the nation-state and of self-organising citizens. If the new wave of citizen movements is to acquire real power, then it will have to organise itself translocally from the beginning, whereby coalitions of cities with clear political and economic objectives take the lead. This will require an awareness and continuous attention on behalf of Green activists and politicians, which should underpin all of their actions.

Footnotes

[1] A fab lab (fabrication laboratory) is a small-scale workshop providing services and equipment for digital production.[2]2 Vrijheid & Zekerheid. Naar een sociaalecologische samenleving (EPO, 2016, in Dutch). Dirk Holemans. An English essay with the core elements of the book will be available at the end of 2017 on the website of the Green European Foundation (Ecopro project): www.gef.eu

]]>In this rapidly changing world, existing systems are being weakened, resulting in risks as well as opportunities. The global economic crisis has degraded people’s working and living conditions but has also raised questions about the legitimacy of financialized capitalism.

The development of digital technology has produced new types of precarious jobs, but it has also opened new ways of understanding and changing our society in more participatory ways. As the history of crises has shown, people and people-based organisations react against the devastating effects of changes and persist in the search for innovative solutions. New ideas and practices have been proposed; there have been experiments with new forms of organizations and ways of working. Some of them, such as the “sharing economy”, were immediately captured by emergent, digitally-based capitalist companies, but others created more ambitious and innovative initiatives. In recent years, certain concepts and experiences have interconnected with one another and existing initiatives. New forms of solidarity, reciprocity, property and collective governance are being analyzed, reimagined and promoted through the logic of the Commons, Platform Cooperativism and the Social and Solidarity Economy.

The Commons, as defined by scholar David Bollier, is a shared resource, co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms. Claims to the commons are built on the legitimacy of the right of access to goods and services, or to their preservation, as means of satisfying equity goals and long term resources involving cooperation and sharing. Natural (agriculture, housing, co-working…) and immaterial resources (software, database, IT infrastructure) may be involved.

These “commons” strengths are marginalized by capitalism and are subject to capture by the collaborative economy’s large digital platforms. They share values and methods with the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), including cooperatives, in order to build a more democratic and inclusive society. They interest cities and trade unions.

In this context, a conference focused on Fair Sharing economy and Platform Cooperativism was organized jointly by La Coop des Communs, SMart, Confrontation Europe, the P2P Foundation, CECOP-CICOPA Europe and Ouishare, with the support of the European Economic and Social Council in Brussels on 5 December 2016. The conference highlighted diverse models of commons-based solutions, the relationship among various actors in the production chain, their roles in the creation of value and ways that value is distributed.

Reaching an understanding between Commons, Coops, Unions, Cities and Labour

The organisers and main panelists of the conference decided to continue working together to deepen the understanding of the issues being raised. Although they came from different fields, such as the commons movement, the cooperative movement, the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), cities and regions actively working with the SSE organisations and the labour movement, they agreed that they would benefit from a better understanding of each other through developing a dialogue and working together.

Cooperatives are inspiring models, as well as organizational resources, similar to other forms of social and solidarity economy organizations based on non-capitalist structures that give power to members and not to capital, are not-for-profit oriented or limited profit, indivisible reserves, etc. Are these models sufficient, particularly for commons that do not create market value and do not sell products on the market? Are there other social and solidarity models that suit them? If not, what would these be and how should we define and describe the needs to be addressed? Reciprocally, what can the commons bring to cooperatives, cities and unions ?

The aim of our project is to generate reflection and create links and possible convergences between several cultures and stakeholders, cooperatives, social and solidarity economy, commons (and open source and collaborative platforms), cities, trade unions. Creating a dialogue and understanding among these stakeholders is a prerequisite to any common reflection and common action such as concrete projects, advocacy, etc.

In this respect, we met in a deep dive encounter near Brussels, Belgium on 11 and 12 July 2017. The expected outputs were:

A better understanding of our respective goals and methods, especially on the commons, by clearly identifying the points of “common interest”, “common understanding”, incomprehension, and diverging views.

A position paper about the range of needs and focal issues to tackle together.

A collaborative inventory of the experts and structures working on specific categories (e.g. legal experts, labor experts, etc.) that would provide an accurate mapping and help identify relevant collaborators for our future work.

A glossary of commonly used terms, noting differences in various languages and contexts.

A list of already-overcome problems and remaining challenges.

The commons and peer to peer, in relation with cooperation and unions

Introduction to the Commons and P2P

The Commons, cooperatives and unions are ways of managing the complexity of the world. New forms of community organizations are emerging to manage a necessary worldwide transition towards new ways of creating and distributing value. Commons, cooperatives and unions are all involved in collective action to transcend the shortcomings of capitalism where the Commons are always a component, even if not identified as such.

The Commons have three main features: a resource or a gift (what), activated by a community (who) and rules/protocols set and used by this community and also for future generations (how). They are a social process, a mode of production and a way to see the world.

What: We need to address the dwindling of natural resources and the privatization/commodification of socially productive knowledge. Enclosures are an historical process. Capitalism has led to commodification, not to commoning. Currently, natural resources are used as if they were unlimited, while knowledge is being enclosed through copyright laws and patents. These trends need to be reversed and the commons offer an alternative model for doing so. It is a question of human design. While the state and the market are here to generate capital, the commons have another logic: empowering the community.

Who: There are potentially 4 billion people worldwide creating commons in fishery, hunting grounds, and more and more through digital commons. These commoners are neither producers nor customers; they form a novel category. Although commoning often takes place in the periphery or outside the state/market nexus, the commons can interact with both, reversing their logic away from control and accumulation toward enabling the capacities of civil society.

How: Different types of organizations have emerged to counter the phenomenon of enclosures (mutuals, coops, trade unions, etc.) They all fight for decent work and for people to reap the value of what they produce as communities.

“Peer to peer” (or P2P) is a relational dynamic, a sort of transnational logic of relations inside and among the Commons. It is based on openness, transparency, the right to share and the right to hack (understood as repurposing existing systems for things they were not designed to do). P2P systems are highly efficient, which makes them very attractive to capitalism. If P2P becomes a dominant mode of production, how can we prevent capitalism from exploiting it? How we take control to prevent the extraction of value? How can we promote, not an extractive, but a generative economy?

P2P production is commons-based and commons-oriented.

Links with the state and the market

Peer to peer allows direct and distributed interactions between individuals or organizations. It helps crystallize collective power, more in a logic of a network than of a federation.

Commons-based peer-production is not designed a priori and from above. It is open to anyone who wishes to contribute (non-discriminatory, permissionless) and is anti-rival (the more people contribute, the higher the value). The P2P Foundation sees peer to peer as a model of global connection between nodes of commoning.

New technology

Digital tools allow us to scale up group dynamics; these are the new technological capacities that enable such production. The transaction costs are falling along with coordination costs (see cooking recipes).

Platform and Open Cooperativism

Platform coops and open coops share the same values. They overlap but have different narratives:

Platform coops are about democratising the ownership and control of the digital platforms that mediate our day-to-day activities. The commons are not a core part of this message, but something additional.

Open coops are supportive of Platform Coops and the urgent need they address, but in general they are more future-oriented. Open Coops can be described by 4 non-prescriptive patterns:

Oriented towards the common good and not only to the members interests; it is included in the statutes

Multi-constituent, they seek to enfranchise all those present in the value chain.

Actively co-producing commons and giving back to the commons.

Transnational in nature.

Open coops can advocate for filters on the use of a commons. An example is the Peer Production License: depending on certain criteria, you may use a commons freely or you may need to pay a monetary fee. The idea of open coops is not to make it transnational from the top, like Mondragon did in Spain, but to replicate it locally (mainly through open source) and perhaps confederate later.

Could these 4 patterns be added to the 7 ICA principles and be a field for negotiation?

Debates and reactions

Who can be part of the community? These are the commoners who determine who is part of the community, it is more about equitable access (according to some criteria) than about strict equality. Yet, there is a risk that the rules set are discriminant against those perceived as “the other”. “This is the dark side of commoning” (Stacco).

What is the true meaning of openness? Openness in a commons is more about transparency, replicability, and the right to share than the fact of being open to everybody. It is more about people being able to understand how things work.

From a union’s perspective, commons look like collective action but not formally organized. Yet with Ostrom, we see that there are rules, and they are more agile and flexible.

Commoning can take the shape of an institution. The division between the state and the market is a social construct. Commoning plays around and between those two worlds.

It’s hard to find resources for commoners. This why commoners need cooperatives and ethical market vehicles. They need to ensure their own social reproduction away from capital..

Commons is a sexy word and it can ignite the imagination, but it can also be coöpted; we have to be cautious.

What brings us together is an effervescence of solutions to the global socio-environmental crisis. ‘Commons-cooperation union’ could sum up our meeting. “The shared mission of our organisations is to help those who contribute to the creation of commons get recognized, paid, and be able to defend their rights and interests”. (Stacco)

The Cooperative Movement

What is a cooperative?

The starting point in the commons is the resource; in a cooperative, it is the community.

Cooperatives were created when the modern enterprise and the modern state were emerging. Since the beginning, a cooperative is:

– An association of persons that have specific roles, common needs or aspirations. The persons are the stakeholders, which is why they make an link between the needs and the stakeholders. The needs are collectively identified, but the persons who create the coop also represent a wider community.

– An enterprise, not a club. The enterprise is instrumental for the association of persons with 2 criteria: joint ownership, and democratic control.

The cooperative movement has been able to define itself and is now recognized by governments, trade-unions, people. This is the reason why cooperatives hesitate to change this definition, not to have to give new definitions to their partners.

Principles and Relation with the external world

The cooperative is by no means the final purpose of its members; it’s an instrument to reach a common goal.

There are 7 International Cooperative Principles:

Open and Voluntary Membership

Democratic Member Control

Members’ Economic Participation

Autonomy and Independence

Education, Training and Information

Cooperation Among Cooperatives

Concern for Community

Some clarifying points:

Autonomy: A cooperative must be a private structure, independent from the State, which means that a public authority can’t retain the majority of the cooperative.

Openness: A cooperative must give access to persons who are eligible (eg. farmers) but it does not mean that any unemployed person can go into a workers’ coop in search of immediate employment.

Cooperation between cooperatives: This principle can create bridges between cooperatives and may be applied to open coops and/or commons.

Relations with the community: You must plug into a wider community. This principle, formerly implicit, officially became the 7th ICA principle in 1995.

Democracy: the principle one person/one vote can be adapted, by giving the possibility to have several delegates to the general assembly, who have each one voice.

Financial aspects:

Each member has to participate in contributing to the capital. Remuneration is often strictly limited and calculated according to the volume of transactions. The surplus made by the cooperative can be distributed among members according to the volume of transactions made with cooperatives.

Moreover, a certain part of the surplus must be reinvested within the coop as an indivisible reserve, which is non nominal. This often represents an important percentage of the equities. There are 2 opposing views on this crucial point:

The reserves must be shared if the members decide so (UK, North of Europe)

The reserves are indivisible and must be devoted to a similar organization or to the State in case the cooperative terminates.

Connection with the Commons:

Contrary to the Commons, cooperatives start around communities, not resources.

The multi-stakeholder coop model seems to be thriving, eg. the social coops model in Italy or the SCIC model in France. They are oriented towards general interest services.

Three facts seem to have put more emphasis on the commons recently: shifts in property law, the rise of technological innovations, and a growing ecological concern.

Debates and reactions:

How to connect the commons with employment rights?

Can indivisible reserves be considered as commons?

Can human capital be considered as a commons? See the education principle.

The multi-stakeholder form of cooperative seems to be a structure facilitating commons (but multi-stakeholder coops are usually not a commons per se).

New tools of open democracy are very interesting, but:

How can we lead good negotiations online?

How can we be aware of the stakes when we belong in several organizations?

How do we protect the weakest in open discussions, so as to avoid silencing people or taking decisions without someone’s opinion?*

The Social and Solidarity Economy

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) includes all the private legal bodies with activities in line with social economy principles: social goal, democratic governance, and profit (if any) mainly put toward the development of the enterprise, non-divisible assets, etc. They mostly include associations, cooperatives, mutual societies, or foundations.

SSE is an umbrella concept for different kinds of organizations, which all need institutional recognition.

The statutes are important and so are the rules and tools for managing and governing. Isomorphism can result from management tools.

There are different national cultures regarding the SSE. For example, recently, French law recognized social enterprises organised as commercial societies in its scope, which is not the case everywhere in Europe. And as regards unions, they are not much involved in the French social economy because social services in the working world have traditionally been assigned to works councils.

There is a trend towards a higher recognition of the SSE in Europe. CEP-CMAF, which was created in 1989, has become Social Economy Europe, which creates a list of standards very close to those of the cooperative movement. The European Council took a resolution on the SSE in 2015, as did the European Parliament also; many national laws recently took the same direction. Right now there is a trend towards institutionalization of the SSE, which helps regulation and legitimization, as opposed to, for example, the woolly or unclear concept of social business.

SSE has always been involved in services of general interest, the defense and promotion of which have been a great fight in the EU for nearly 30 years now. General interest and common good are always the result of hard negotiations. Making a stand for common goods is essential.

The commons are, in this respect, a response to the marketization of the SSE. There’s been a shift from a civic towards an economic conception of the social economy. Public procurements have changed the spirit of social economy: professionalization, concentration of structures, marketization… Civic and economic worlds shouldn’t be separated (e.g. the disregarded Third Sector). The commons have the advantage of merging both things. The common good can be a unifying concept for making coalition partnerships between public authorities, commoners, businesses, social economy structures. The commons can learn from the volunteering culture of SSE, for instance, some people are simply giving, but don’t ask for direct reciprocity.

The SSE principles oriented towards sustainability (asset locks, devolution of equities to a non for profit organization) can be helpful for the commons. Can the commons be part of the SSE?

Trade Unions

In a sense, trade unions can be considered as commons: they steward the workforce, they form the community of workers, and they have a set of rules. They are not a productive entity but they ensure that the value created is remunerated fairly.

Would trade-unions be useful in a world of commons and cooperatives? Our social model is our commonwealth.

Unions are fundamental to keeping things together in order to allow people to make the best of their growing autonomy (enabled by digital platforms, for instance) rather than being exploited. They should also protect commons (skills, infrastructures…) to allow workers have the productive means in their hands.

Trade unions’ claims regarding the digital economy are focused on more information on the productive processes of platforms, better coverage of non-standard forms of employment or independent workers, openness of data. They want to accompany change in order to reach an acceptable digital transition in terms of working conditions. They challenge this new conception of work, ie. “we are all entrepreneurs”.

Workers and unions are concerned by the global supply chain: they do not want to lose what they have fought to get. Previous experiences of transition were not successful. The narrative on the commons have to focus on these preoccupations: protecting together the standards we have.

There are two good entrances to convincing unions to commit to the promotion of commons:

The sustainability of companies is more sustainable (the way the wealth is produced and managed)

The quality of jobs, how to manage the work forces.

Debates and reactions:

What brings us together is the quest of a better work (ILO’s “decent work”) and it goes through a revival of cooperativism, unionism…

We have to extend the range of work and social protection. According to SMart, getting out of the employer/employee relation is the only way to come up with universal security.
It is also important to recognize invisible/unpaid work. For the moment, no one recognizes those who contribute to the commons because they don’t get paid for it. The issue of universal basic income, proposed by Guy Standing and supported by many unions, is a federating concept to that matter.

There is a need for alliances. Union coops have been successfully developed in the UK and the US. There is also an enormous field of collaboration to be envisaged at the ILO or at the European Commission.

In many cases, it is more the role of states to regulate, so it is complicated to find alliances between cities and unions in Europe, while in the US, for example, it is more on the city level that things like wages are negotiated, as shown by the campaign ‘Fight for 15’. But unions can bargain with cities when it’s appropriate.

Could unions use their pension funds to help? It is a longstanding discussion within unions but for now, nothing is happening. Pension funds of union trusts (essentially in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian world) have investment criteria like tobacco disinvestment or labor conditions, but focus just a little on the social economy.

We have to be careful about the commodification of all sectors, like the care sector.

Unions and Cooperatives in the UK

Developed economy is becoming undeveloped economy. We see new enclosures of work, of social protection, of land. Precarious housing is accompanying precarious work.

British unions go way beyond their core mission of defending the workers’ rights: because precarious workers and social issues are intertwined, unions in the UK are supporting initiatives like housing coops, social coops, community land trusts, and try to create a synergy between those fragments of life.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, community development is very important (especially in the US with the Civil Rights Movement) for empowering marginal populations in community-based enterprises.

There are several unions that work tightly with coops to provide good employment to the community, eg. the musicians’ union in London, self-employed teachers; they somehow act as labor brokers.

A sectoral strategy should be considered.

In the UK, cooperatives widely resort to capital raising. Community shares have been issued in the UK (“cooperative crowdfunding” with equity) for land trusts, pubs, football clubs, etc.

Cities and Municipalities

REVES is a political network bridging cities/regions and local/regional social and solidarity economy structures. The context of cities/regions is really specific depending on the country, culture etc. However, everywhere you see that more and more, they recognise the need to build partnerships with other local actors (social and solidarity economy, other community organisations, universities, etc.).

Regarding the digital economy, cities/regions might act from different motivations. In some cases, the link is by accident, for example, when there is an issue with a platform like Uber or AirBnb. Others might already have strategies for the development of the digital economy as the economy of the future – but not all link them to other objectives they might have in parallel, such as the promotion of the social and solidarity economy. In other words, a kind of overall vision linking both might not exist in a number of cases. Some cities have begun to develop these overall visions and consider the digital economy also as an instrument to promote SSE. Still others may wish to do the latter, but do not have resources and capacities.

REVES developed, tested and adapted the Territorial Social Responsability (TSR) method, with experimentation in Italy, Sweden, Poland and Spain. Starting from a territorial analysis of needs and a reflection on the vision of inhabitants of their community (via tools enhancing participation), principles are developed. These principles are used by public authorities, enterprises and organisations to review their practices and strategies.

Based on TSR, the Community Foundation in Messina was built. It works based on funds, fixed assets and knowledge shared and further developed by a broad alliance of local actors (including the social and solidarity economy) with the aim to serve the local community and well-being of all. In Poland, social policies were developed using the TSR method. In Berlin, the Pfefferwerk Foundation is a good example for community-based urban development.

Public procurement has to be rethought: is the government entitled to make all choices for the citizens? Is it good to put social economy actors in competition? In cities such as Brescia, they do not carry out public procurements, instead they are convening diverse local actors to discuss what the needs and potentials are, and the projects they should launch.

It would be interesting to define a bit better the relationship between these examples, open cooperativism, and commons.

Debates and reactions:

In Great Britain, a coalition of community land trusts acquired about 50 lands in several years without almost no help from public authorities. Maybe this model can be replicated, especially as physical spaces are much needed. Therefore, help from cities would be highly valuable.

Developing territories/real spaces is a key issue, because even digital commons need physical spaces. But let’s speak of spaces rather than of cities because otherwise we would forget rural areas, which are already marginalized.

We should consider the strategy of rezoning: when people favor local shopping, local development, rather than big brands and so on. It could be a strategy for the commons.

The experience of collaborative commons in Barcelona

The commons culture of Barcelona is rooted in a tradition of self-management, cooperatives and autonomy. The election of the Barcelona en Comu mayor can be partly explained by this ethos, and the city government is very local (≠ Podemos), coming from social movements, which can explain this cohesion.

There are many networks of common use in Barcelona and the digital commons mostly replicate the physical world interactions and are generally neighborhood-rooted. This policy is supported by the city hall. They have a sort of incubator for digital social projects: La Comunificadora, there are also research projects in line with this commons strategy (Dimmons for digital commons, IGOP for political science and urban commons). They bring knowledge to policy makers/actors and have a role of networking (eg. the Procomuns conference).

However there are downsides. Despite the city’s will, they don’t have much legal power to promote these initiatives, and some decisions can be contested at national or European levels. There is also a lot of wishful thinking, and they don’t have many resources. Another problem is that many initiatives happen but don’t mutualize.

Debates and reactions:

In Brussels there will be be a regional election soon and there is a movement that wants to push for a commons strategy. How to replicate the Barcelona example? Barcelona has a very territorial spirit that goes beyond political divisions (often people identify with their district’s name); there is also a Barcelona en Comu narrative.

There is a neoliberal independent party in power in the region so it’s hard to have a complementary strategy between the city and the region.

Territorial commons

After the festival Le Temps des Communs, which took place in Lille some years ago, they created the Commons Assembly of Lille.

Their activities include a mapping of the ecosystem (eg. coworking spaces), launching a territorial web search engine (Communecter), developing a General Political License, a Legal Service for Commons (free servers hosting community websites). They use a wiki.

They also work tightly with POP, a social enterprise specialized in the commons. POP has contracts with cities, businesses, etc. These contracts recognize the participation of commoners in the creation of services, and reciprocity agreements define how the company reinvests in the commons (tools, particular individuals, etc.).

In Tournai (Belgium) the Co-Construire event will take place from August 29th to September 1st, consisting of 4 days of workshops on writing a reciprocity contract, legal, fiscal implications and more.

Reflections on the Deep Dive Dialogue

These are the general reflections that emerged from the group’s dialogue, compiled by Guillaume Compain. They do not necessarily reflect any collective agreements, but more mutual understandings and a general train of thought to take our efforts forward. It is also important to note that the reflections were made on a personal level by those present at the Deep Dive and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the organizations or sectors they represent.

The commons as a paradigm shift

At once a system of regulation, a social process and a way to see the world, the commons offers a new paradigm in how to consider the production and stewardship of resources. In a commons approach, a community manages a specific resource and sets itself a range of rules for use, adaptable through time. The commons can be used to steward a physical resource, such as a fishery or a hunting ground, or a digital resource, like the knowledge pool Wikipedia, for instance.

The rationale of the commons is to take care of resources, not to extract value out through a process of commodification. It is a generative economy rather than an extractive one. The commons fight against marketization and enclosures, and in turn favor the openness of resources. At the same time, care must be taken regarding commons-washing (similar to greenwashing and sharewashing). A commons approach can be demanding and needs to have clear rules.

Promoting economic democracy

The commons bring a new perspective to economic democracy by introducing a new kind of regulation of resources, where the people are no longer in the dichotomy of producers or consumers; these roles are intermingled. Although it deals with a resource rather than with a need (as cooperatives do) commoners share with the cooperatives the vision of a democratic way to organize human activities. The commons are in line with the spirit of multi-stakeholder organizations such as the SCIC cooperatives in France, the social cooperatives in Italy, or the model of open coops promoted by the P2P Foundation, ie. transnational multi-stakeholder cooperatives contributing to the commons and oriented towards the common good.

All agree that the multi-stakeholder cooperative should be supported more deeply. The multi-stakeholder cooperative could even be a structure facilitating the commons (even though it can’t be a commons per se).

Empowering the community and favoring local development in new partnerships with public bodies

In recent years there has been a shift from a civic to an economic conception of the social economy. Notably, public procurements have changed the spirit of the social economy: professionalization, concentration of structures, marketization. Civic and economic worlds shouldn’t be separated (as it is with the disregarded “Third Sector” term).

The commons are a response to the marketization of the SSE and they can be a unifying concept to make coalition partnerships between public authorities, commoners, businesses, and social economy structures in order to enable participatory local development. This is in line with REVES’ strategy. REVES have tested and adapted the Territorial Social Responsability method to enhance citizen participation (eg. Community Foundation in Messina, Social Services Charters). For example, they push for a rethinking of public procurement whereby cities should convene a diversity of local actors to discuss what the needs are, what are the potentials and the projects they should launch. We should consider strategies of rezoning (local shopping, local development). The British model of community land trusts, acquiring urban spaces often with the help of cities, also seems to be an interesting option. Let’s also not forget rural areas, which are already marginalized.

The latest improvements of digital tools also help enhance the direct participation of citizens. P2P technologies, for example, allow the free collaboration of people, a new kind of collaboration, not designed a priori nor from top-down approach. Yet, developing physical spaces is a key issue even to support digital commons, because commoners need physical spaces for their activities.

A commons cooperative economy?

An economy where networks of cooperative organizations would use and steward shared commons can be envisaged. This is essentially the concept of open coops. The use of these shared resources could be based on certain criteria (socio-environmental purpose, openness, contribution to the commons) and through different mechanisms, like licenses.

Several territories are beginning to experiment with the development of an economy of networked organizations using commons. In Barcelona, the commons culture is rooted in a tradition of self-management, cooperatives and autonomy, and is now backed by the municipality (Barcelona en Comu, a left-wing government close to social movements) through some instruments like La Comunificadora (a sort of incubator for digital social projects) and two research projects bringing knowledge to policy makers/actors and having a role of networking (Dimmons for the digital commons, IGOP for political science and urban commons).

Yet, at the city level, they lack resources and legal power. Another example can be found in Lille with the Commons Assembly. Among their activities, they are doing a mapping of the ecosystem, launching a territorial web search engine (Communecter), developing a General Political License, and Legal Service for Commons (free servers hosting community websites). They also have an interesting interaction with POP, a social enterprise specialized in the commons, whose commercial contracts recognize the participation of commoners in the creation of services and define in what terms the company reinvests in the commons (tools, particular individuals,etc.). The Co-Construire event will take place in Tournai (Belgium) from August 29th to September 1st, with 4 days of workshops on writing a reciprocity contract: legal, fiscal implications, and more.

Supporting commoners and promoting decent work

Considering all the potential virtues of commoning for the empowerment of the community and economic democracy, there is a need to help those who contribute to the creation of commons get recognized, paid and able to defend their rights and interests.

First of all, it is important to find out how to connect the commons with employment rights. Unions were also worried about the role that would be offered them in a commons world. We have to extend the scope of work and social protection. According to SMart, considering access to social protection and labour rights outside of the employer/employee relation is the only way to overcome many current challenges. Multistakeholders coops and common based initiatives allow that frame, as participants are also owners.

It is also important to recognize invisible/unpaid work. For the moment, those who contribute to the commons aren’t recognized for their economic and social contribution because they aren’t paid, and aren’t paying social contributions. The solution of universal basic income, supported by some organisations, is challenged by others as too liberal. This issue has to be studied.

The necessity of being inclusive

Moreover, new tools of open democracy, although very interesting, carry certain risks. Can we lead good negotiations online? How can we be aware of the stakes when we belong to several remote organizations? How do we protect the weakest in open discussions, so as to avoid silencing people or taking decisions without someone’s opinion?

The commons can learn a lot from the volunteering culture of SSE. For instance, sometimes people just want to give without asking for direct reciprocity, so measuring the contribution to a commons is maybe not always necessary, although recognition and acknowledgement of such contributions is always helpful.

A need for alliances within the social and solidarity economy

The commons are both a way to empower citizens and to strengthen the actors of the social and solidarity economy. Therefore, it requires and allows for stronger collaborations between coops, unions, cities, associations, etc. We have a large window of opportunity here, all the more as there is a trend towards a higher recognition of the SSE in Europe, that helps regulation and legitimization: the European Council took a resolution on the SSE in 2015, as did the European Parliament, and several national laws recently took the same direction. At a more micro level, self-help organizations like coops, mutuals and unions are appropriate answers to the shortcomings of our current social model.

The world of cooperatives can be highly valuable for the support of commoning. In the UK for example, cooperatives often resort to capital raising. This model could be expanded and used to support the commons. Another idea emerging from our discussion is to study to what extent the indivisible reserves of cooperatives could be considered as commons.

We have a wide field of collaboration between our respective organizations, notably at the ILO or at the European Commission.

The path to alliances with the unions

More than ever, unions are required to face the growing precarity of workers under the digital economy.

Union cooperatives have been successfully developed in the UK and US. In various cases, unions have acted as labor brokers and worked tightly with coops to provide good employment to the community (e.g.: a union supporting a musicians’ coop in London, another union supporting a cooperative of self-employed teachers). Community unions go way beyond their core mission of defending workers’ rights. Because precarious workers and social issues are intertwined, they support initiatives like housing coops, social coops, community land trusts and try to create a synergy between those fragments of life. A question is raised: could unions use their pension funds to help support this commons economy? It is a longstanding discussion within unions but for now nothing is happening. Pension funds of union trusts (essentially in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian world) have investment criteria like tobacco disinvestment or labor conditions, but barely consider social economy. However, we can see that unions can be a precious ally in the promotion of commons and more cooperative models of organization for the future economy.

Two good entrances to convince unions to commit to the promotion of commons would be to show them i) how useful the commons can be to help the companies become more sustainable and ii) how it could impact the quality of jobs.

As a conclusion, we all agree that we should all join forces and go deeper in our common research, strategies and actions. Hence, a further reflection on the missions of our group is developed below.

Tentative Conclusions

Throughout the deep dive meeting, participants reached several common understandings as follows.

The idea of commons can be an umbrella concept of this encounter. It was agreed that the idea of commons which has been strongly promoted by the commons movement can be also found in the value and practices of the SSE, the cooperative movement and the labour movement. More and more cities and regions adopt the idea of commons for managing citizens’ common resources through more participatory and democratic partnership. New initiatives and experiments are put in practice across different fields.

To solidify the idea of commons, specific organizational forms in the SSE (in particular, multi-stakeholder cooperative model) might be one of the good frameworks. Certain parts of traditions and practices in the SSE and cooperatives may be renewed and reactivated in light of the idea of commons. For example, some practices such as indivisible reserves could be rethought as creating and increasing common wealth in the community across generations. The concept of general and collective interest which is one of the core missions of the SSE may be enriched with the idea of commons as well. It is also expected that the idea of commons and its innovative methods might counter the tendency of instrumentalization of the SSE by the State and by the market.

As a broader but more concrete field, the role of cities and regions in promoting the commons received special attention. With the experiments already practiced in many cities and regions, it was stated that cities and regions have a growing interest in the idea of commons for building participatory partnerships with other local actors, as well as for developing the digital economy as an economy of the future.

It should be noted that there are increasing concerns about new forms of work and employment in the changing world of work, in particular in the digital economy. Whereas the digital economy allows people to organize their work and life in different ways and to engage in the creation and promotion of the commons, it has also produced a significant level of precarisation and informalization of work and employment. In this regards, trade unions have focused on the protection of workers with non-standard work forms and an acceptable digital transition in terms of working conditions. Interesting experiences of union cooperatives, of the collaboration between trade unions and cooperatives for protecting workers with non-standard work forms, and of SMart as a specific form of cooperative for providing social protection and rights at work to freelancers were shared.

Based on the 2-days discussion, the deep dive meeting participants agreed to maintain this community, tentatively named “Co-Communs” (COmmons with COooperatives, Municipalities and UNions) and to develop common actions for

research and knowledge

organization of meetings and events

political and legal advocacy

service provision

This nascent community is as still flexible and inchoate as the phenomenon it want to focus on. However, the participants of this community believe that in this way, diverse ideas, experiences and competences from different fields may contribute to the development of the phenomenon around the idea of commons and as a consequence, a broader alliance for making better and sustainable our society and promoting decent works in the digital economy will be constructed.

Erdmuthe: “Forming an alliance of organizations, able to create and spread a pool of knowledge and competences for sustainable and participatory local development and solidarity between territories”.

Alison: “To develop a platform to share experiments, experiences, best practices, and a knowledge base of democratic economy at local/village/city/regional/provincial/state/national/multinational levels”.

Hyungsik: “Maintain a network to inform and be informed of what each is doing on our common issues”.

Stacco: “If P2P/network dynamics are moving from the periphery to the center of the economic activity, let’s ensure the economic benefits are circulated towards the commons/production of social value and not absorbed by capital”.

Pat: “Develop effective union/coop partnerships to create good work in the solidarity economy and as commons”.

Nicole: “Using, through common activities, the commons framework and practices to empower ourselves and our organisations to transform us and the world in order to take care of commoning and prevent commodification”.

Bruno R.: “Better analyze and define the commons and its categories as well as the link between the commons and the creation and preservation of:

Bruno C.: “Provide expertise and do political advocacy to promote the development of the commons, SSE and new forms of ensuring decent work along with other similar organizations”.

Julien: “Contributing to the platform coop movement from a SSE, commons, trade unions and cities perspective”.

Guillaume: “Researching on and promoting (experimental) forms of multi-stakeholder cooperation (production or mutualization of resources) that include: a social mission, decent formal/informal work conditions, democratic governance and the stewardship of commons”.

What are the next steps?

As an emerging coalition, it is difficult to settle on concrete goals for the group. Certain directions emerged in the discussion, including:

Maintaining the community while helping and strengthening partner organizations by:

]]>http://commonstransition.org/organizing-and-governing-the-commons-a-coop-commons-multilevel-dialogue-with-municipalities-and-labour/feed/018069Summer of Commoning: a Tour of French Communities and Projectshttp://commonstransition.org/summer-of-commoning/
http://commonstransition.org/summer-of-commoning/#commentsWed, 08 Nov 2017 13:46:53 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=18014During the summer of 2017, the P2P Foundation's Maïa Dereva travelled throughout France. Now she shares the stories of the commoners she met along the way.

]]>During the summer of 2017, I travelled throughout France. Now I am sharing the stories of the commons I met along the way, never knowing what I would find in advance. These articles were originally published in French here:Commons Tour 2017.

“La Fonderie”: 30 years of successful participatory housing

When I left the metro station in Vanves, south of Paris, I discovered a pretty, modern and flowery city. Just a few steps from the station, I found the porch I had been told to look for, and crossed beneath it to find the participative habitat where I would spend a week. It was a large building, nestled between the wall of the cemetery and the surrounding houses, wrapped around a tree-lined garden. Suzanne, a young retired woman, welcomed me and gave me a tour of the property.

La Fonderie is a project begun in 1984. This building was first a factory, bought by a developer forced to buy it as part of a lot, but who didn’t know what to do with it. He was delighted when the families (first 3, soon 10) offered to buy it so they could do some work and make their participatory housing project a reality.

From the beginning, the habitat was intended to save energy and be environmentally friendly, but the craftsmen capable of building a wooden frame building (more than just soundproofing) were not legion at that time. The group agreed to a compromise: the building would be made of concrete with a wooden frame, and a very nice wooden façade would be added. It was no easy task, as the building was completely twisted and the carpenter in charge of its cladding almost threw in the towel several times! All of the residents had to persuade and encourage him to finish.

After two years of work, the building finally emerged: 9 apartments from 70m² to 120m² in various shapes; a common room; two shared guest rooms; a workshop and a shared cellar; as well as a garden equipped with a compost. The only thing young couples completely overlooked at the time was the issue of aging. There are stairs everywhere. Nothing was planned to make life easier for people with reduced mobility, so it’s a question of adding an elevator in the column provided by the architect, but it wouldn’t solve the problem for apartments that are almost all duplex or triplex.

The truth is that when the project was started, the inhabitants were not planning to be doing this 30 years later! This is a particularly exemplary experience because, after all this time, the same families (with one exception) remained in the area. Of course, the fifteen or so children who grew up there have now moved away, but the original couples are there and continue to operate the common parts of the place – for example, welcoming people like me, or opening the meeting room.

What is the secret of such longevity? First, a fairly strong convergence of values eg., ecology, anti-liberalism (or, anti-neoliberalism) and practices. Most of the inhabitants of La Fonderie are also involved in local associations like the local newspaper, environmental film festival, cyclists’ association, etc. They took part in the creation of the first AMAP (community-supported agriculture) in Vanves, opening their collective compost to the inhabitants of the district. In short, they are people who are comfortable with community life and citizen involvement.

The second secret is that community life is governed by clear rules, based on unanimity. At first, there was a monthly meeting (sometimes more) to discuss all subjects. In time, the unwritten rules of common life were integrated by everyone. Today, a single annual meeting is enough to solve a number of unusual questions. Things also happen informally: in the corridors, the garden, or during the many shared meals. There’s also a whiteboard outside for “on-duty” messages.

Conflicts? Of course there were some. But they all got settled, the most effective method being… time. Today, most of the inhabitants of the place are retired, and are not always present in the building. The question of community sustainability arises. What will happen to the place? Will it be sold gradually to the highest bidder in a context where the PLU jumped 30%? Suzanne is confident that “We won’t all leave at the same time,” she explains. “It’s also possible that we can gradually integrate new inhabitants seduced by our way of life, acclimatize them and pass on our traditions.”

Mainstenant and the pirate island

The extraordinary thing about nomadism is that it lets me discover people and places whose existence I could never have suspected! On the recommendation of a commoner friend, I found myself one day with my little suitcase-on-wheels at the Paris Saint Lazare station; I took a suburban train and 25 minutes later disembarked in another dimension…

After a good fifteen minutes of walking, I reached a barely noticed dock and before long, a small boat approached and I boarded for a trip to the opposite side of the river. I had arrived on the island of Platais! Here, Laurence came to greet me, and guided me through a maze of small green pathways.

Laurence, a researcher at the university, is part of Mainstenant, a group of about fifty people who set out to revive abandoned places, villages and buildings – not only for leisure or work, but also to settle permanently and live with their families. And among the places they discovered, there is this extraordinary island.

It is, in large part, inhabited, sometimes year-round but most often in the summer. There are lots of cottages, large and small, made of fibre cement or wood. This place looks like a giant campsite whose tents and caravans would fall down eventually. As you stroll along the narrow roads, it’s almost like “The Village” in the Prisoner series.

But the most surprising thing was yet to come. A whole part of the island is indeed uninhabited, abandoned after a period of glory now past. Accompanied by Adrien, Nicolas, and a whole bunch of explorers of all ages, I crouched in the grass beside an old disused swimming pool worthy of a cinema set.

My hosts were obviously at home in this ruin! They brought me around the property with a big smile, happy to show me the empty cabins, the old piano, the graffiti (more creative than many others), the tiled terrace giving onto a splendid panorama, the vestiges of an unlikely miniature golf re-colonized by nature…

Then we pushed a little further on, between the trees and the nettles, and settled down on a hidden beach. While the children laughed at each other in the muddy waters of the Seine, the adults took care to calmly pick up potentially harmful objects: rusty rims, pieces of glass, plastic and scrap metal…all the rubbish from civilization landed on the shores of this magical island.

When the sun set, we went to the association’s chalet to prepare the evening meal together around the wood fire. And while the humidity was already starting to invade the lawn, we happily settled around a large tablecloth, just below the pirate flag that proudly floats on the garden fence.

For a city girl like me, this getaway was a real life lesson. It reassures me that people can explore and invest in abandoned places in order to open up spaces of possibilities. I really felt that what they do, they do for us as human beings who are completely disconnected from their needs and from nature, left so vulnerable to the challenges that lie ahead.

The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble: building the city together

It was with great pleasure that I met Anne-Sophie and Antoine during my journey, while taking a break in the beautiful city of Grenoble. We happily shared the practices of the Lille and Grenoble assemblies of the commons over a coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

Anne-Sophie and Antoine were both elected to positions in city hall. They shared stories with me of citizens engaged in a dynamic of counterpower and, after being elected in 2014, of their difficulty in taking on an institutional posture. Changing culture is not always easy! But this is what also makes the Grenoble Assembly of the Commons so special, born of the meeting of two dynamics.

The first of these two comes from Nuit Debout, within which a “Commission of the Commons” was created in 2016. The idea was to discuss the management of commons as a common responsibility: not only the responsibility of public authorities, but also of the area’s inhabitants.

The second dynamic, on the part of city hall, was the philosophically interesting idea of investing in a space between the private and the public, to make room for citizens in the public debate. The key here is that this idea has not been abandoned at all, in fact it unites activists and elected representatives in the same assembly today.

What the elected representatives underline is that even if they have the will to make a difference in the direction of greater citizen involvement in public life, it is not so simple. Legislation is not adapted at all, particularly with regard to risk management (the insurance framework does not exist). On top of that, officials are not so aware, and not trained to work directly with citizens. Faced with this, the elected representatives asked the services to work on these points and advance the texts and practices.

Nevertheless, among the completed projects at the town hall level, there have been agreements created for occupying public spaces such as shared gardens, for example. The assembly also discussed the idea of writing a charter on housing, a bit like in Bologna (Italy), where a charter of urban commons was drafted and signed by some forty Italian cities.

The city also participates in a “migrants’ platform” to accompany reception initiatives.There are also participatory budgets: every year, 800K€ in investment is opened to citizens’ projects. 106 projects proposed by the Grenoble region were selected in 2017. On the cultural side, we can cite the desire to take art out of museums with the Street Art Festival, whose traces can be found all over the city walls.

To date, the Assembly of the Commons has set up four separate working groups which meet asynchronously at regular intervals:

Natural Commons

Knowledge Commons

Urban Commons

Commons of Health and Well-being

The spirit of commons in Grenoble has a long history. After the Second World War, unlike many other places, the city had, for quite a while, retained its own operators to manage electricity and water, which made it a very special case.

After being privatized in the 1980s, water came back into the public domain after a citizens’ lengthy legal battle with certain elected environmental officials and some employees of the water authority. This was the first battle won in France for water municipalization, along with the first French users’ committee to make the citizens’ involvement in water management last. The whole world visits Grenoble for its water management model. And on the electricity and gas side, the operator is a mixed-economy company but the public (the city of Grenoble) is still the majority shareholder.

This civic expertise and spirit of solidarity continue today, and are embodied in the city’s desire to be part of a concrete, lasting relationship between two communities that “do with others”, all the others…

The Assembly of the Commons of Marseille: a prefiguration full of promise

This new postcard will be sunny! If there is one characteristic peculiar to Marseille, it is its light. This is what I discovered by spending a few days there on the invitation of Pierre-Alain, a commoner with whom I had already communicated on the theme of the assemblies of the commons. That’s how I had the chance to participate in the very first commoner meeting of that region.

To get off to a good start, we began with a nice little restaurant on the Vieux Port, of course

It was an opportunity to get acquainted with about ten participants, and discover the diversity of their profiles and respective projects, from the association leader to the lawyer, through the researcher, the doctoral student and the company managers – the table looked like my idea of an assembly of the commons: a joyful mix of heterogeneous careers.

We then joined the MarsMedialab, a magnificent third space of 350m² in the heart of the city, to start the work session proper. The objective was very simple: to bring together the good will of the regions around the question of the commons. The problem was clear: what do we do with this goodwill? What kind of actions can this group implement? What structure should it have?

In addition to the people, the roundtable allowed us to (re)discover a number of emblematic national and local commons and initiatives such as:

SavoirsCom1, a collective committed to the development of policies and initiatives related to knowledge commons;

Ars Industrialis, a cultural association created by Bernard Stiegler, whose only regional branch is located in Marseille;

L’Office, a structure that accompanies the cultural, social, educational and economic transitions from a “digital society” to a “communal society”;

H2H, a software platform that supports the projects of the Hôtel du Nord residents’ cooperative;

ManuFabrik, a cooperative which is part of the field of popular education;

Pas Sans Nous (Not Without Us), an association that has given itself the role of being a union of working class neighbourhoods.

The exchanges were rich and very engaging. Those present were committed to making concrete progress in the local commons. But for a first meeting it was important, before discussing specific projects, to share a common vision of the group’s organization and the methodologies to be adopted to work together.

With this in mind, I shared the practices of the Assembly of the Commons of Lille, in particular the governance model that we have adopted in our collective which has been working very well for the past two years, stigmergy. With the support of Pierre-Alain, who is already convinced, I was careful to stress the importance of documenting practices to facilitate the inclusion of newcomers and promote transparency in processes.

During the afternoon, the specificity of Marseille’s dynamic appeared to me in two ways:

First, it seemed quite clear that there were two fairly distinct movements. On the one hand, the needs related to what could resemble an Assembly of the Commons: mapping the commons, creating a network, and on the other hand, very pressing and concrete questions concerning the establishment of an economy of the commons, which would be more like a Chamber of Commons structure.

Second, since the region is vast, it seemed obvious that at least two major geographical poles were emerging: a group centred on Marseille and its surroundings, and another anchored on the side of Sophia Antipolis.

What also emerged from these exchanges was that each of them was already well engaged in their own projects, so time was inevitably limited to invest in a new collective, which would make the assembly a form of “hub”, a chamber echoing each other’s initiatives. But the willingness to get to know each other and to create a true community by working together on concrete initiatives was palpable.

To sum up, after the meeting with the Grenoble commoners, this Marseilles exchange convinced me that the assemblies of the commons are very unique places of co-creation, in which we must not try to apply a centralized theoretical model, but welcome the contributory impulses in a dynamic anchored locally and respectful of the geographical and historical specificities of each location.

“Les Ateliers” in Castres: from dream to reality

If there’s one common that I want to present to you, it’s this one! I was fortunate enough to be able to attend its conception, so it’s moving to see, a few years later, that the baby has grown up well and is working like a charm.

What is it all about? The “Les Ateliers” cluster, located in Castres in Tarn, is a place dedicated to the development of sustainable economy. It is almost 4000m², located just a stone’s throw from the city centre, fitted out to accommodate a whole lot of projects in connection with the Social and Solidarity Economy (ESS): a shop of local producers, a restaurant that buys from them, a recycling plant, a coworking area, offices and spaces for rent, etc.

Barely a year after its opening, it looks like this place has been part of the landscape for ages. However, it took time, energy, creativity and the concerted actions of an entire collective to make it happen.

The story begins in the late 1990s. Pierre has been an entrepreneur and head of the family textile business for 20 years, inherited from his father and grandfather. Over the years, he contributed to the company’s growth from 40 to 250 employees. Then suddenly, the European borders opened up, especially to the Chinese market. It didn’t take long for customers, seduced by half-price deals, to desert them and for the banks to let go of the company. By the end of 2008, its fate was sealed: first liquidation and then dismissals. “Humanly, it happened with a lot of respect, no one was responsible for the situation, but it was very hard for everyone” Pierre says.

Once unemployed, the entrepreneur, long interested in the operation of cooperatives and looking for a way to reinvent, started a Master’s degree in Social and Solidarity Economics at the University of Toulouse. As part of his training, he was asked to present a project. It was then that he imagined this pillar…

It turns out that the building dedicated to the logistics of his former business had miraculously escaped liquidation thanks to a tenant who had come to set up shop one month before the auction! Of course, you had to have some imagination at that time to think that the place could accommodate something other than shelves of abandoned lockers. I visited the place when it was still an industrial wasteland, I can tell you that it was very impressive and sad to walk the long empty hallways lit by pale neon lights, and the sheds haunted by mannequins.

In Pierre’s mind, things were very clear: this project would be collective, or it would not be. As of August 2011, the dynamics took shape in the form of an association, with the participation of Regate and Regabat (two cooperatives for activity and employment of the territory), the IES (a regional cooperative for solidarity financing), and the CRESS (regional chamber of the social and solidarity economy).

The first project presentation meeting in October 2011 gathered some 50 interested parties. Since the family tradition had not disappeared with the company, Jean, Pierre’s son, started the feasibility study with a small 6-month contract financed by the European Union. Things moved along relatively quickly, given the scale of the project:

2012/13: Etic, the real estate company, which creates, finances and manages office and retail spaces dedicated to social change actors, becomes a partner and finances the project;

2013/14: Selected by LaboESS as the model project for the “Territorial Pillar of Economic Cooperation” (PTCE), alongside 23 other projects; and the building permit is submitted;

2016: the building is completely renovated, the residents settle in, and the various projects open one by one: the restaurant, the shop of producers, the textile shop, and so on.

The association then transformed into a SCIC (Cooperative society of collective interest), with 2 co-managers, about 50 partners (individuals and structures), 11 employees and one person performing civic service. SCIC governance operates on the principle of “1 person = 1 vote”. “There is also room for communities, but there are no volunteers at the moment” says Pierre.

If I wanted to present this project to you, of course it is because I was personally involved in its start-up, and the energy deployed by Pierre, Jean and the collective impressed me very much. But it is also because today, Les Ateliers seems to me to be an exemplary achievement of “commons”, or rather, several interlocking commons.

In terms of buildings, the property owner Etic now owns the place, ensuring the project’s longevity. In the cooperative, the functioning of governance allows everyone to become involved and feel that they are part of the initiatives. Even within the structure, freelancers installed in the co-working space have recently decided to meet under the brand name “Les Ateliers de la Com” to answer calls for bids together.

Of course, there are experiments at all levels, so everything is not without risk and decisions change with experience. Although profitable activities partially fund activities that do not finance themselves, the economic model is still seeking to be refined. Many services are and have been provided free of charge. At this level, the cooperative seeks to develop partnerships with institutions in order to be supported by demonstrating the impact and interest of the project for the territory.

As for the general spirit, Pierre said it best: “After 20 years of classical entrepreneurship, I discovered another approach. In the SSE community, these are not the same human relationships. For example, ethical funders are listening to us and looking for solutions with us. I have always tried to have this state of mind in my company, and my desire to show that you can do things differently has come true. The big difference, as an entrepreneur, is that I felt supported by the partners and surrounded by the collective. Employees are partners, and everyone is motivated to move the project forward.”

And now, with great serenity, Pierre has just retired…even if he doesn’t rule out lending a helping hand from time to time

]]>http://commonstransition.org/summer-of-commoning/feed/118014The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperativehttp://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/
http://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/#commentsThu, 19 Oct 2017 14:30:34 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17964What does a post-capitalist, cooperative and open source society would look like? A full study on the Catalan Integral Cooperative.

Founded by an assembly of activists in Catalonia in 2010, the CIC’s revolutionary aspiration is to antagonize Capital by building cooperative structures in the Catalan economy. Its commitment to the principles of the Commons, Open Cooperativism and P2P, make it a prototypical example of a new generation of co-ops connecting the Commons and cooperative movements. Their position is that a truly collaborative economy can only develop when it’s commons-based.

1. Introduction

The Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) is one of the most interesting cooperative projects which have sprung up during the age of crisis in Europe. First of all, it is notable on account of its revolutionary character: the main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.

To fulfil the purpose it has set itself, the CIC is engaged in an impressive spectrum of activities: although it was formed just seven years ago, it has already been actively involved in developing infrastructures as diverse as barter markets, a network of common stores, an alternative currency called ‘eco’, a ‘Cooperative Social Fund’ for financing community projects and a ‘basic income programme’ for remunerating its members for their work. By setting up such structures, the CIC aspires to be an organizational platform for the development of a self-sufficient economy that is autonomous from the State and the capitalist market.

The CIC moto: ‘social transformation from below through self-management, self-organization and networking’

In view of its radical character, it is not surprising that the CIC has attracted the attention of the popular and radical press, which praise it as a promising prototype of the counter-structures that the so-called milieu of the social and solidarity economy is building in order to antagonize the dominant economic system.[2] Unfortunately, these reports, though interesting, have a serious limitation: they do not go into much depth in their description of the CIC and therefore do not provide a thorough overview of its activities and mode of organization. In consideration, however, of the possibility that CIC’s cooperative model holds lessons that extend well beyond the Catalan context, my colleagues from the P2P Foundation/Commons Transition and I could not help feeling that the case of the CIC merits further study to elucidate the way it is organized. With that in mind, we decided to contact the CIC with the purpose of organizing a ‘field-trip’ in Catalonia in order to study the cooperative close up. In this way, a few months later in March 2016 we came to Catalonia to carry out a field-study, whose findings are documented in the pages of this report.

2. Studying the CIC: A note on our methodology

This report is based on a field-research of an ethnographic character, using the method of participant observation from March until May 2016.

For the purpose of this research project, I arrived in Barcelona on March 2016, following consultation with some core members of the CIC with whom my colleague from the P2P Foundation, Stacco Troncoso and I had discussed, in general terms, the rationale and the aims of the research during the previous three months.

For the entire period of my stay in Barcelona, I had the luck to be hosted at the building of AureaSocial, which is in a way the headquarters of the CIC in the city. Being there was extremely helpful for the research, as I was in daily contact with the many members of the cooperative who work at the building, practically living with them for two months.

As the cooperative is organized in committees, the first thing I did to collect information was to interview members of all its committees. I talked to people from all the committees that are currently active, who willingly provided me with whatever information I needed to understand what they do and how their activities are organized. Luckily for me, it was equally easy to observe some of them at work – such as the Reception Committee or the Committee of Economic Management, as their workplace is based at AureaSocial where many of their members come on a daily basis. Others I had the opportunity to follow in the ‘field’, as when I followed the CAC team with its van in order to see with my own eyes the network of self-managed pantries that the CIC has linked together across the entire Catalonia.

Naturally, as the activities of the cooperative are not confined to Barcelona, but extend across the entire Catalonia, the field-research included several visits to various places in Catalonia: I attended several assemblies and meetings of local exchange groups and visited the autonomous projects related to the CIC (the so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’) in various cities and towns in Catalonia, where I had extensive discussions with their members.

Last, though I do not believe that such a thing as an ‘objective observer’ exists, I feel obliged to confess my deep sympathy for the CIC. One of my strongest motivations for carrying out this field-research was to find out more about the work of the CIC in Catalonia and explore how that experience could be fruitfully transferred to other places.[3] I hope this report will be useful to those who are interested in learning more about what the CIC does and how it is organized, encouraging them to reflect critically upon how a new generation of cooperative projects like the CIC might change the world for the better.

3. The CIC in a nutshell

The historical, ideological and political context

Τhe Catalan Integral Cooperative was founded in Catalonia in May 2010 at an assembly of local activists. It is, as its name implies, a cooperative project focused on Catalonia.[4] It has a strongly activist and anti-capitalist character, as it is animated by the principles of the ‘integral revolution’, which means it aspires to the radical transformation of all facets of social and economic life.[5] With this goal in mind, it has launched a series of initiatives and projects around the development (at the local level) of a cooperative economy and a cooperative public system, in which basic needs like food and health care are not commodities but social goods everyone has access to.

Enric Duran (Source: Wikipedia.org)

The first time one hears the name of the CIC is usually in connection with the exploits of its charismatic leader, Enric Duran. Duran, a Catalan hacktivist involved in the local anti-globalization movement, entered the public spotlight in 2008 when he went public with his story of how he had tricked the spanish banks into giving him loans of about half a million euros, which he gave away to various activist projects. For Duran, who never had any intention of returning that money, it was a conscious act of expropriation that he planned with the aim of inspiring others to join the struggle against the capitalist banking system. As was to be expected, his story attracted a lot of media attention and Duran, who earned the sympathy of many fellow activists, soon became known as the ‘Robin Hood of the banks’. Emboldened by the success of this action, he and some like-minded activists soon began to work on a new project around the creation of cooperative structures for the transition to post-capitalism. The idea was outlined in a newspaper they distributed in 350,000 copies all over Spain in March 2009, which propagandized the development of ‘integral cooperatives’.[6] This call resonated with the feelings of many Catalan activists, triggering a wave of molecular processes in the milieu of social movements, which led to the collective founding of the CIC in May 2010.

A year later the ‘indignados’ began to occupy the squares in Spain. The emergence of the 15M movement in Catalonia found the CIC ‘prepared to battle’ and so many of its members threw themselves into the struggle against the ‘politics of austerity’. At the same time, because of the active participation of its activists in the collective processes of the movement, the CIC emerged much stronger through it, attracting a lot of new members. As Nathan Schneider says, “when the 15M movement, a precursor to Occupy Wall Street, installed itself in city squares across Spain to rail against austerity and corruption, protesters swelled the CIC’s ranks”.[7] As a result, although the ‘Movement of the Squares’ subsided, CIC’s participation in it left an important legacy, as many of the defining characteristics of the movement live through the cooperative, such as the activist character, the aim of building an alternative economic system and the primacy of the principles of self-management, inclusivity and direct-democracy in the decision-making process.

During all this time, Duran played a leading role in shaping the CIC: not only was he the one who, more decisively than anyone else, defined its vision, but he also recruited new members, organized its committees and spearheaded the development of new CIC initiatives and projects. However, in 2013 in order not to go to prison, he was forced to go underground and leave the country.[8] Since then, he has concentrated his efforts on a new project called ‘FairCoop’,[9] thus placing the responsibility for the organization and operation of the cooperative in the hands of the committees it is made up of.

Committees

The easiest way one could describe the internal organization of the CIC is as a collection of about a dozen committees, each one with its own field of responsibility. For example, the Economic Management Committee, as its name implies, is responsible for the economic management of the cooperative, the Legal Committee is entrusted with legal matters, the IT Committee deals with the IT infrastructure and so on. In consequence of this division of labour, committees work largely autonomously from each other. To coordinate their activities, the cooperative holds assemblies (the so-called ‘permanent assemblies’ which are held once a month), where committee members make decisions collectively based on consensus. In line with the principles of cooperativist and anti-authoritarian organization, these assemblies serve to collectivize the managerial process, thereby ensuring its participative and inclusive character.[10] That is, in a nutshell, the way the CIC is organized: the ‘core’ of the organization is made up of a dozen committees which coordinate their activities collectively and anti-hierarchically through frequently-held assemblies.

From close up, the first thing that stands out about committee members is how they are not motivated by reasons of financial or professional advancement. On the contrary, the character of participation in the committees is clearly activist: committee members do not consider themselves to be working members of a conventional cooperative. For them, the CIC is not just a cooperative, but an activist project in which they are heavily involved. However, in contrast to activist projects manned by unwaged volunteers, the activists of CIC committees receive a kind of salary from the cooperative, known as ‘basic income’, which has the purpose of liberating them from the need to make a living by working somewhere else, thus allowing them to commit themselves full-time to their work at the CIC.[11] An interesting feature of that form of remuneration is that it is made up of both euros and ‘ecos’, that is, the alternative currency used by the forty or so local exchange networks that exist in Catalonia (we will discuss the eco and the local exchange networks in more detail in the context of CIC’s economic ecosystem in chapter 6).[12]

Self-employed members

The CIC has a plethora of members outside its ‘core’. First of all, it has about six hundred ‘self-employed members’ (the so-called ‘auto-ocupados’), who use the legal and economic ‘tools’ of the cooperative.[13] They are mostly independent professionals and small producers (both individuals and collectives) who operate informally without having any legal hypostasis. In Spain, as a general rule, people who start a small business or set themselves up in private practice register with the Tax and Social Security Office as ‘autónomos’. The cost of becoming an ‘autónomo’, however, is prohibitive for a large number of people, given that they have to pay a minimum of around €250 a month.[14] Consequently, for many, the cost of this system precludes the possibility of operating formally. To them, the CIC offers a practical solution: the CIC has set up a series of legal entities, whose legal form its self-employed members can use in order to issue invoices. Legally speaking, therefore, auto-ocupados are not members of the CIC, but members of those organizations. In exchange for this service, auto-ocupados have to pay a (minimum) membership fee of €75 every three months.[15] Unlike ‘core members’, however, few of them tend to get involved in CIC’s organizational matters. In that sense, auto-ocupados are peripheral members, who do not participate in the collective processes of the CIC.

Oddly enough, although it has legally set up several other companies to accommodate the needs of its self-employed members, the CIC itself does not have a legal form, which means that “officially, there’s no such thing as the CIC”.[16] The advantage of operating in this way is that it makes the CIC more flexible vis-à-vis the State and its control mechanisms.

Territorial and economic network

Aside from self-employed members, the CIC has more than two and a half thousand members through the ‘local exchange network’ (which will be discussed extensively in the context of CIC’s economic ecosystem in chapter 6) that it launched in 2010. This, together with the rest of the local exchange networks operating in Catalonia, forms a crucial component of CIC’s territorial network and of the economic system that it proposes as an alternative to the dominant market.

Alongside this ecosystem of local exchange groups, CIC’s territorial and economic network encompasses the consumer groups that are responsible for the daily operation and management of twenty ‘pantries’ (the so-called ‘rebosts’) across Catalonia. These local consumer groups are connected to each other through CIC’s Catalan Supply Center (CAC), which is the CIC committee coordinating the transportation and delivery of products from the producers to the pantries. We will discuss how this network of pantries is organized in more detail in the next chapter.

Last, CIC’s territorial network includes several so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’. These are basically projects in which the CIC has been involved or is collaborating with. To better understand their organization and and how they are related to the CIC, we will look at the most prominent of them in chapter 5.

But first, let us take a closer look at the ‘core’ of CIC to explore in more detail what its committees do.

4. The organizational core: The CIC Committees

At the present time, the organizational core of the CIC consists of ten committees. In order to understand the breadth of the activities they perform and how they are organized, we shall now look at them in more detail.

Coordination Committee

The Coordination Committee deals with the internal organization of the cooperative, focusing on the coordination and evaluation of the work of its committees and working groups. An important part of its work is the formulation of the agenda of the so-called ‘permanent assemblies’ (which are held once a month and constitute the main decision-making organ of the cooperative) based on the topics for discussion submitted by the members of the other committees.

The committee is made up of three main members and two collaborators (a facilitator and a psychologist), who meet once a week at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona (which is discussed in the context of the so-called Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative in the next chapter). For its economic sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the CIC.

Reception Committee

The Reception Committee is responsible for the induction process of new CIC members. Τhis process consists, in the first place, in providing guidance and advice to people who contact the CIC asking for information about the cooperative and the services it offers its members. For that purpose, they are invited to attend an info-event (known as ‘acollida’) organized by the committee once a week (usually every Friday) at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona, where they are familiarized with the activities of the cooperative as well as with the legal and economic tools it provides to its members. Those who are still interested in becoming members of the cooperative are invited to a personal interview where they can discuss more extensively their needs with committee members and the way in which they wish to participate in the cooperative.

In addition to the guiding role it performs through the aforementioned ‘acollida process’, the committee’s activities include the capacitation of CIC members, the promotion and networking of affiliated projects in Catalonia as well as the development of relations of collaboration and mutual aid with collectives and projects in other countries.

The committee is made up of eight members, six of whom are based in Barcelona. For the purpose of work coordination, its members meet once or twice a week (usually at AureaSocial), whereas decisions are made collectively (based on consensus) at the committee’s assembly, which takes place once a month. For its economic sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

Communication Committee

The Communication Committee is responsible for managing matters of communication related to the cooperative. In specific, it is responsible for the public promotion of CIC’s activities as well as for handling the requests for information submitted by its network and the broader community. In parallel, (like the Reception Committee) it serves as a channel of communication between the cooperative and other collectivities. In the context of its priorities, the committee emphasizes the importance of empowering actors in the CIC network and enriching their skills, so that communication-related activities (such as filming events and developing promotional material) can be performed by any member of the cooperative without the direct involvement of the committee’s core members.

Presently, the committee is made up of three members, who meet once a month at the building of AureaSocial. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

IT Committee

The IT Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of CIC’s information-technology infrastructure, including its mail server, its websites and social networks as well as specialized IT tools, such as the GestioCI invoice processing software used by the Committee of Economic Management and ‘self-employed members’ of the cooperative for the purpose of managing invoices and bills.[17]

The committee is made up of seven persons, four of whom are currently very active. Email is the primary means of communication among committee members, who meet twice a week at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona in order to coordinate their work. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

Common Spaces Committee

The Common Spaces Committee, which is made up of five people, is responsible for the so-called ‘common spaces’ of the cooperative, that is, buildings and houses used by the cooperative and its members as a shared resource. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the cooperative. Presently, the only infrastructure the committee is responsible for is the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona (which is discussed in the next chapter on Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative).

Productive Projects Committee

The activities of the Productive Projects Committee, which has two members, centre on facilitating the process of ‘self-employment’ and the exchange of knowledge and skills. To this end, the committee is responsible for the operation of CIC’s ‘jobs portal’ (called Feina Cooperativa) aimed at facilitating job seekers to match their skills to jobs posted by productive projects associated with the CIC.[18] In parallel, it runs Mercat Cooperatiu, an online directory of self-managed and cooperative projects in Catalonia, which accept ‘social currency’ (i.e. ecos) in exchange for the products and services they offer.[19]

Economic Management Committee

As its name implies, the Comissió de Gestió Econòmica is entrusted with the economic management of the cooperative. At the same time, it is the CIC committee which is responsible for the induction process of new ‘self-employed members’ (the so-called ‘auto-ocupados’), familiarizing them with the legal and economic tools that the CIC provides them with and helping them circumnavigate the social and economic structure of CIC’s cooperative network. The committee is made up of six core members (five of whom are occupied on a full-time basis) headquartered at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona and four more members based in other parts of Catalonia.

The Office of the Committee of Economic Management at AureaSocial. Photo by Daniel Molina (Source: Schneider 2015)

CIC has two main sources of expenses: the ‘basic income’ received by the members of its committees and the funding it provides for affiliated projects. In order to cover these expenses, like any other cooperative, CIC relies on members’ fees: the fees collected from the six hundred active ‘auto-ocupados’ (who are required to pay a fee of a minimum of €75 every three months) account for about 50% of CIC’s income. The remaining 50% of its income comes from the so-called practice of ‘economic disobedience’: that is, the tax refunds received by the cooperative for every invoice self-employed members make (using one of the legal forms through which the CIC operates). Donations from sympathizers represent an additional – though presently insignificant – income stream.

Legal Committee

The Legal Committee is responsible for managing legal matters related to the cooperative. In parallel, it provides CIC members with legal assistance, which they can pay for by using either social currency (i.e. ecos) or euros. Crucially, the committee places a great deal of importance on delivering this legal service in such a way as to empower recipients, helping them understand the legal process and the technicalities involved in their cases.

The committee is currently made up of two lawyers based at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona. For its sustainability, the committee relies (a) on the fees it collects from its clients, that is, CIC members to whom it provides legal assistance and (b) on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the cooperative.

The Catalan Supply Centre

The Central d’Abastiment Catalana (CAC), which means ‘Catalan Supply Centre’, is one of the most active CIC committees.[20] It was formed in 2012 with the aim of creating a logistics network for the transportation and delivery of the products of small producers, who are ‘self-employed’ CIC members, across the entire Catalonia. In effect, it is a ‘public service’ that CIC offers to small producers and consumer-prosumer groups in Catalonia.

The main infrastructure of the network are the so-called ‘rebosts’, that is, the self-managed pantries that the CIC has set up all over Catalonia – twenty of them, to be exact – which constitute the ‘cell’ of the organizational structure of the network. Each one of them is run autonomously by a local consumer group that wishes to have access to local products as well as products made (by producers associated with the CIC) in other parts of Catalonia through the list of products provided by the CAC (which currently includes more than a thousand products). The way in which the supply chain is organized is as follows: the products go from the seventy producers that currently supply the network to the two principal rebosts in L’Arn and Villafranca and then are distributed by the CAC vans to the local rebosts, where from the local consumer groups collect them.

CAC member Vadó and the CAC van

The CAC is made up of a team of four persons, half of whom are working full-time. This team is responsible for coordinating the network of rebosts through CAC’s online platform, which the rebosts use in order to choose the products they want and submit their orders.[21] The payment for the orders can be made in euros or by using the social currency eco. In this way, the CAC platform servers as the ‘instrument’ that enables the coordination of consumption and production in such a distributed environment.

In addition to performing a coordinating role through its online platform, the CAC is also responsible for the transportation and delivery of products from the producers to the local rebosts. In this task, it is assisted by five-six more persons, who use their own vehicles to transport and deliver products to some areas of the network. To cover their expenses, these collaborators receive 21 cents for every kilometre they make.

For its sustainability, the CAC relies on income from two main sources: first, it collects 5% of the price of every product, as well as 18 cents for every kilo it delivers. At the same time, the CAC members receive a ‘basic income’ from the CIC.

For organizational matters, the CAC team has three meetings per month, which often have the character of an assembly. However, the place where they are held is not fixed: each meeting is held in a different rebost in order to facilitate the interaction between the ‘coordinating organ’ and the ‘nuclei of local self-management’, as the CIC calls the consumer groups that are responsible for the operation of each rebost. For the future, CAC’s plans focus on strengthening the links between rebosts and producers so that payments can be made directly by the rebosts to the producers without the intermediation of the CAC.

Network of Science, Technique and Technology

The Xarxa de Ciència, Tècnica i Tecnologia (XCTIT), which means ‘Network of Science, Technique and Technology’, is the committee responsible for the development of tools and machines adapted to the needs of productive projects in CIC’s cooperative network.[22] The driving force of XCTIT is its conviction that the machines developed by the industry are not appropriate for the needs of commons-oriented projects, which they imprison into a relation of dependence with capitalist firms. By contrast, XCTIT develops solutions – which exemplify the principles of open design, appropriate technology and the integral revolution – geared to the needs of small cooperative projects. In this way, XCTIT serves as a ‘vehicle’ for the re-appropriation of science, technique and technology by the new cooperative movement.

Presently, XCTIT’s activities focus on the development of various prototypes – mostly of agricultural tools and machines – and the organization of training workshops for the purpose of knowledge sharing. XCTIT is also engaged in the licensing of the technology artefacts developed by the committee and its collaborators. Its last undertaking is an open design license called ‘XCTIT-GPL’,[23] which gives end-users the right to modify and redistribute XCTIT-GPL-licensed technologies, thereby protecting legally the free sharing of knowledge.

The committee is made up of five core members (working full-time) and about twenty collaborators who are actively involved in its activities. For the coordination of the group and decision-making, XCTIT has an assembly once a week at Can Fugarolas, where its workshop has been hosted since 2014.

Can Fugarolas[24] is not just a building. It is a collectively-managed space of 4.000m2 in the seaside town of Mataró (near Barcelona) in Catalonia, which is host to the activities of about a dozen collectivities like XCTIT. For the payment of the rent, which is a thousand euros per month, each collectivity contributes according to how much space it occupies inside the building as well as based on the character of its activities – whether or nor they are profit-oriented and ‘eco-friendly’. For XCTIT, in specific, the rent of the space occupied by its workshop is a hundred euros per month.

Until recently, the activity of the committee was supported by the ‘basic income’ of four hundred ‘monetary units’ received by each of its members. However, in the context of CIC’s strategy of decentralization, the permanent assembly which was held in Barcelona in May 2016 decided to discontinue the provision of basic income to the XCTIT, thereby turning it from a committee into a financially autonomous project. Consequently, in order to ensure its sustainability, from now on XCTIT plans to rely on the following two sources of income: first, it collects 20% of the revenue from the workshops organized by other groups and collectivities at XCTIT’s space inside Can Fugarolas.[25] Furthermore, it aspires to complement its income through replicat.net, which it recently launched as an e-shop for the prototypes developed by XCTIT and its collaborators.[26]

XCTIT’s workshop at Can Fugarolas (Source: Replicat.net)

5. Autonomous projects of collective initiative

An interesting element in the organizational canvas of the CIC are the so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’ (PAICs).[27] These are cooperative projects the CIC is connected with through a relation of collaboration, solidarity and mutual aid on the basis of common values and principles. In most cases, they are projects in which CIC members have been actively involved from the early stages, thereby creating a bond between them and the CIC. As Enric Duran explains, “there’s an ongoing reciprocity [between PAICs and the CIC] as the efforts taken by the whole [CIC] are key to making these PAICs possible, allocating various kinds of resources to make them a reality. PAICs normally also respond to the strategic objectives of the CIC itself”.[28] However, even though the term PAIC itself implies that they are autonomous (from CIC in terms of their management), in fact some of these projects are embedded into the organizational structure of the CIC. In order to understand how these projects are organized and how they are related to CIC, we will look at the five most prominent of them: AureaSocial, CASX, SOM Pujarnol, Calafou and MaCUS. The former two (AureaSocial and CASX) are run by the CIC, whereas the others (Calafou, MaCUS and SOM Pujarnol) are fully autonomous with regard to their management and daily operation.

AureaSocial

AureaSocial is the informal ‘headquarters’ of the CIC in Barcelona, a 1400m2 building at the heart of the city, whose daily operation is entrusted to the Common Spaces Committee.[29]

The AureaSocial reception dimly illuminated, a few minutes before closing down for the night

The story of the building is quite interesting: the building belongs to a company, which resorted to leasing it to the CIC (in exchange for a symbolic rent) when it went bankrupt six years ago, thereby obstructing the legal process of seizure and foreclosure by the bank. This is, in short, the ‘strategy’ that has allowed the CIC to appropriate this space. Launched in 2010 as one of CIC’s so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective intiative’, AureaSocial is now a space used for a multitude of activities: such as for many of the work meetings and assemblies of the CIC committees; for public talks, seminars, conferences and films as well as for all sorts of workshops (anything from workshops about how to improve one’s humour to vegan cooking).[30] The space hosts the office of the Committee of Economic Management, a free public library, a gift shop for clothes and the central pantry of the CAC in Barcelona. Furthermore, it operates as a co-op working space: the rooms on the 1st floor are used during the day by psychologists and physiotherapists for their professional activities, generating a monthly income of about two thousand so-called ‘monetary units’, which means that users can pay for the rooms they use either in euros or ‘ecos’. This income is then used by the Committee of Economic Management to cover various needs of the cooperative, such as the provision of the ‘basic income’ received by committee members or the payment of utility bills for AureaSocial. To ensure that nobody is excluded from making use of the working spaces, an alternative way by which users can pay for the rooms is by contributing their labour: for example, by working at the reception or helping to clean up the building.

AureaSocial’s entrance

CASX

The Cooperativa d’Autofinançament Social en Xarxa (CASX)[31] – which means ‘Cooperative of Social and Network Self-financing’ – is a savings, donations and project funding cooperative, which was set up with the purpose of providing funding for projects that are aligned with the principles of the CIC and the integral revolution, as “the deposits made to CASX are used to finance self-managed individual or collective projects aiming at the common good”.[32] To this end, since 2013 CASX has provided €59.329 of funding to eighteen projects.

The CASX logo

Launched by CIC in 2012 as an ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’, CASX has been operating legally as a co-op since 2013, using the legal form of Xarxa d’Autogestio Social SCCL, which is one of the ‘legal tools’ the CIC offers to its member-projects. Presently, CASX has 155 members, of which many represent other cooperatives and collectivities. The membership fee for individual projects is €15 and €51 for collective projects. Taking into account the activist character of the project as well as the fact that deposits to CASX are interest-free, it is truly remarkable that the total amount of deposits made in the last four years exceeds €250.000 (for a more detailed analysis, see graph below).

CASX deposits over time (Source: CASX presentation at the permanent assembly of the CIC, 2015)

The members of CASX make decisions based on consensus through its assembly, which takes place once a month at AureaSocial.[33] However, the CASX assembly is not fully autonomous, as many of its decisions must be approved by the permanent assembly of the CIC before they can be implemented. Close, for obvious reasons, is also the collaboration between CASX and the Committee of Economic Management. For its daily operation, CASX relies on two CIC members, who receive a basic income of 140 ‘monetary units’ (which, in their case, amount to 120 euros and 20 ecos) per month.

The operation of CASX has been suspended since the beginning of 2016 in order to re-engineer its organization around a deposits and funding model based exclusively on ecos, which is slated to roll out when CASX resumes its operation in the coming months. Alongside the implementation of the new business model, CASX’s main goal for the future is the decentralization of its model through its local reproduction “so that every neighborhood, town or city can start generating their own CASX assembly, redirecting the resources of their local members to local projects”.[34]

SOM Ρujarnol

SOM Ρujarnol[35] is a group of people animated by the principles of the integral revolution and agro-ecology, who live and work in a thousand-year-old tower (known as the tower of Ρujarnol in Banyoles) in the Catalan province of Pla de l’Estany. It was launched about four years ago as an ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’ of the CIC, with the aim of exemplifying a humane and environmentally sustainable model of living in the Catalan countryside.

The tower of Ρujarnol at night (Source: SOM Pujarnol)

The tower and the seventy acres of land surrounding it belong to a Foundation, which has leased it to the CIC for a period of fifteen years in exchange for a thousand euros per month, with the proviso that the cooperativa will repair those parts of the tower which have suffered the wear and tear of time. That is, besides, the main reason why the rent of a 600 m2 tower is that low, as the ones responsible for its restoration are the members of the group living here, which is presently made up of nine persons, including two children.

For the purpose of decision-making, the group has an assembly once a week, in which its members make decisions about the management of the project based on consensus. As for routine tasks, such as cooking and cleaning up common spaces, they are assigned through a system of job rotation, so that all members participate equally in carrying them out.

The ‘wheel’ used by SOM Ρujarnol members for the purpose of job rotation (Photo by Luis David Arias Castaño)

SOM Ρujarnol’s relationship with the CIC is not a relation of economic dependency, but one of collaboration based on common principles,[36] as SOM Ρujarnol no longer receives any financial support from the cooperative. Thus, for the economic viability of the project, SOM Ρujarnol depends on income from three main sources: it produces and sells products – such as falafel, sauces (e.g. ketchup), veggie burgers and humus – through the local eco-network in Girona and CIC’s Catalan Supply Center (CAC); it organizes events, such as jam sessions on Fridays; and it provides ‘bed & breakfast’ accommodation for travellers who wish to spend a few days at the tower.

Music night at SOM Ρujarnol (Source: SOM Pujarnol)

Calafou

One of CIC’s most emblematic ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’ is Calafou,[37] the self-proclaimed ‘post-capitalist colony’ which settled in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned industrial village in the Catalan county of l’Anoia, about 65km away from Barcelona.

Τhe entrance to the Calafou colony (Source: calafou.org)

The colony was set up with the participation of several heavily-involved CIC members with the aim of becoming a collectivist model for living and organizing the productive activities of a small community based on the principles of self-management, ecology and sustainability. At the same time, it represents an example of the form that former industrial villages could assume in a post-capitalist era.

Calafou’s post-apocalyptic aesthetics (Source: calafou.org)

The first thing one is struck by when visiting Calafou is the aesthetics of the space, which gives the impression of a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic scene, as many of the buildings of the village remain abandoned and half-dilapidated. In reality, however, Calafou is anything but abandoned: at the moment, the colony accommodates a multitude of productive activities and community infrastructures, including a carpentry, a mechanical workshop, a botanical garden, a community kitchen, a biolab, a hacklab, a soap production lab, a professional music studio, a guest-house for visitors, a social centre with a free shop, as well as a plethora of other productive projects.[38]

The Calafou hacklab (Source: calafou.org)

As far as its property regime is concerned, the village was handed over by its owner to Calafou members based on the following agreement: the ‘colonists’ gave him a security deposit of €70.000 and committed themselves to paying a monthly rent of €2.500 for the next ten years. Presently, the colony, which has twenty-seven houses (of 60m2 each), is inhabited by twenty-two people. For the collective management of housing, Calafou members have set up a housing cooperative, which grants them as tenants only the right to use the space they inhabit. In that way, as tenants do not have the right to re-sell or lease their rights of use to others, the land and the houses of the village remain the unalienable property of the housing cooperative. Thus, based on the above agreement, tenants pay €175 per month for each house.

A bird’s-eye view of the village (Source: calafou.org)

According to some of its members, one of Calafou’s most significant accomplishments is its consensus-oriented assembly, which is held every Sunday for the purpose of making decisions as well as for the coordination of daily tasks like cleaning up common spaces, which are self-selected on a voluntary basis by ‘Calafou-ers’. However, the assembly character is not always the same, as its thematology alternates between ‘political’ (for discussion of political issues), ‘managerial’ (for management issues) and ‘monographic’ based on presentations made by Calafou’s working groups.[39]

For its economic sustainability, Calafou depends on three main sources of income: first, the revenues of the housing cooperative (based on the rent paid by residents); second, the contribution made by Calafou’s productive projects;[40] and third, the significant income generated by the various cultural events taking place at the village (like conferences, concerts and festivals).

MaCUS

MaCUS[41] (which stands for ‘Màquines collectivitzades d’us social’, that is, ‘machines collectivized for social use’) is another ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’, which began in 2012 with the aim of becoming a cooperative lab in Barcelona where both traditional machines and new technologies are used for collaborative research, development and production. The two-floor building in the area of Sant Martí, where MaCUS is based, occupies 600m2 and is host to the activities of a close-knit group of modern as well as traditional craftsmen engaged in making wooden furniture, clothes and herbal medicine, fixing bicycles and repairing home electronics as well as photography, sculpture and digital music production.

MaCUS members having a break in the carpentry (Source: MaCUS)

The business model of MaCUS is based on renting out space inside the building to collectivity members where they can set up their workshop. The rent is €10 per square metre and is inclusive of water, electricity, internet and telephone. This income is then used to pay for the building’s utility bills (about €200-300 per month) and its rent, which amounts to €1.833 per month. To strengthen the project’s economic viability, a business model that MaCUS members are currently experimenting with focuses on the development of prototypes with the aim of selling them to third parties, providing thus the collectivity with an additional revenue stream.

For managerial issues, MaCUS members have a monthly assembly where they make decisions in a direct-democratic fashion (based on consensus). Within the collectivity, organization is horizontal and anti-hierarchical: the equality of the members is ensured by the fact that those who rent space inside the building are at the same time members of the collectivity managing MaCUS and as such they can participate fully as equals in decision making.

A 3D-printer developed by one of the members (Source: MaCUS)

The MaCUS basement (Source: MaCUS)

The relationship between CIC and MaCUS is also quite interesting. MaCUS was launched upon the initiative of the CIC and initially depended upon its financial support for the payment of its rent. However, the income generated by renting out space inside the building to collectivity members has allowed MaCUS to evolve into an economically self-sustainable project, which has no need of any external financial aid. Besides, that is the goal of all ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’: to become economically self-sustainable so that they don’t need the financial support of the CIC.

Concluding remarks: A project with a network or a network of projects?

As we have seen, PAICs differ from one another with regard to their degree of managerial autonomy: projects like CASX and AureaSocial are run by the organizational core of the CIC, whereas others, like Calafou and MaCUS, operate entirely autonomously from it. Their only common characteristic is they are all cooperative projects connected with the CIC. In fact, from the point of view of administratively autonomous PAICs like Calafou and MaCUS, the CIC is but one of the projects making up a broader cooperative network based on common values and principles. That actually is more in line with the vision of the CIC for the development of a network of self-managed projects in Catalonia, in which its role is that of providing support services and tools, akin to traditional service cooperatives. And that is very important: the CIC never tried to create a centrally controlled network of projects; on the contrary, its goal has always been the creation of an organizationally decentralized network of projects connected by the same principles, which support each other by sharing resources and capabilities. It makes, then, more sense to view PAICS as autonomous projects in a cooperative network which the CIC reinforces with support tools and services, rather than as projects run by the CIC.

6. CIC’s economic ecosystem: Local exchange networks and social currencies

A characteristic of healthy social movements is that they create the structures and the tools that are most appropriate to their needs and goals. The economic model of the CIC, which aspires to “bring together all the basic elements of an economy such as production, consumption, funding and a local currency”,[42] is paradigmatic of this empirical axiom.

The ‘kernel’ of this economic model are the so-called local exchange networks (or localexchange groups), which are usually made up of tens or hundreds of members who exchange products and services by using their own digital currencies. In essence, each exchange network constitutes a self-organized marketplace for the local community in which its members can buy and sell locally-available products and services. The payment can take the form of barter exchange or if that is not possible, it can be made by means of the local currency used by each exchange network. Transactions made by using these local currencies are based on the principle of mutual credit, which means that when a transaction between two parties occurs, one’s account is credited, the other’s debited. From a technical point of view, keeping track of transactions and of members’ credit and debit balances is done through online platforms known as community exchange systems. These constitute the tool with which the members of exchange networks manage their accounts, as well as a marketplace for buying and selling locally-available products and services.

In Catalonia, in specific, there are more than forty local exchange networks known as ‘eco-networks’ (‘ecoxarxes’ in Catalan) because of the local Catalan currency ‘eco’, some variant of which they all use.[43] Eco’s ‘birth’ in Catalonia can be traced back to 2009 – about a year before the formation of the CIC in 2010 – when the eco-networks of Tarragona and Montseny introduced their own alternative currency (CIC 2015, Flores 2015).

Total amount of transactions per month in CIC’s eco-network (Source: IntegralCES)

Although their size differs substantially, some eco-networks have thousands of members: indicatively, the eco-network launched by CIC in 2010 has 2.634 members.[44] From a technical point of view, the operation of about half of the eco-networks is based on the Community Exchange System (CES),[45] while the rest have ‘migrated’ to the IntegralCES platform,[46] which was developed upon the initiative of the CIC and several eco-networks as a modified version of CES that is adapted to their local needs.

The IntegralCES website

Despite the fact that eco-networks represent an autonomous local structure, they are not cut off from each other: first of all, the software platforms they rely on for their operation make it possible for members of different eco-networks to engage in transactions. Secondly, though each eco-network has its own autonomous assembly, they are all connected through the institutions of meta-governance evolved by the community of eco-networks, such as the ‘Space for the coordination of social currencies’ (‘Espai de coordinació de monedes socials’)[47] and the so-called ‘Bioregional assemblies’ of the South and the North of Catalonia,[48] which serve as an informally-organized coordinating organ for eco-networks across the Catalan territory.

Bioregional assembly in Ultramort in May 2016. Photo by Luis Camargo (https://bioregionalnordcic.blogspot.gr/2016/04/album-de-fotos-de-lassemblea-duitramort.html)

These are the outlines of the economic ecosystem in which the CIC is embedded and which it proposes as a tool for the transition to the post-capitalist society it envisions: a horizontally organized network of self-managed exchange networks with their own community currencies.

7. The development of a cooperative public system

In the context of its strategic aim for the development of a cooperative economy, it is the conviction of the CIC that the goods required for satisfying the basic needs of society should be freely accessible social goods, rather than commodities. For that reason, since its formation in 2010 the CIC has launched several initiatives aimed at the development of a cooperative public system, proposing to displace the centrally-managed state apparatus of public services with a truly cooperative model for organizing the provision of social goods such as health, food, education, energy, housing and transport.[49] In specific, it has set up initiatives encompassing the fields of alimentation, education,[50] health,[51] housing,[52] science & technology and transport.[53]

Of all those initiatives, by far the most successful is the one focused on food. Through the Catalan Supply Center (CAC) it set up in 2012, the CIC has successfully created a fully-functional logistics network for the transportation and delivery of (organic and biological) food produced by small producers all over Catalonia. Another important ‘public service’ that the CIC provides to small productive projects in its locality is that performed by CIC’s Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) in the field of science and technology: by developing technologies and machines adapted to the particular needs of small producers and distributing them under ‘copyleft’ licenses which ensure that anyone can freely use and replicate them, the XCTIT practically democratizes access to tools which would have been otherwise beyond the reach of most small projects.

However, with the exception of the CAC and the XCTIT, most of the ‘components’ of the ‘cooperative public system’ envisioned by the CIC are still at an embryonic stage of development. The reason why these have not been further developed is manifold: in some cases, that is because the provision of public services by the State is, to a large degree, satisfactory for most people – as in the case of the health system in Catalonia – thus rendering the local self-organization of alternative services and infrastructures less imperative. Similarly, it is reasonable to assume that a factor holding back the development of CIC’s efforts in the field of transport is the huge success of various online ‘car sharing’ platforms, which apparently constitute a functional alternative for covering the needs of people without their own means of transport. The most important, however, of all the factors that account for the existing scale of development of CIC’s ‘cooperative public system’ has to do with the practice of self-organization itself. We should not forget that the CIC is, above all, an activist project based on the principle of self-organization: by contrast to traditional organizations which expand and scale-up their productive activities by employing more personnel, the CIC relies on the voluntary participation of the community. That means that the degree to which its strategic goals are actively pursued does not depend on managerial initiative, but on the extent of community participation. From that point of view, one should not hold the CIC accountable for the hitherto limited implementation of the ‘cooperative public system’. To achieve its goals, what the CIC does – much like any other activist project – is expend a continuous effort to communicate its strategic vision and goals with the local community in order to mobilize community actors to participate in the project and take it upon themselves to implement those goals.

8. Open cooperativism

One of the most constructive critiques levelled against the cooperative movement in recent years focuses on the parsimonious participation of cooperative organizations in the production of the so-called ‘Commons’, that is, goods that are accessible to all members of society.[54] The problem is that “cooperatives that work within the capitalist marketplace tend to gradually adopt competitive mentalities, and even when they do not, they chiefly operate for the benefit of their own members. They usually have to rely on the patent and copyright system to protect their collective ownership and may often self-enclose around their local or national membership”.[55] The CIC is exactly the opposite of such cooperatives: in fact, one of the reasons setting the CIC apart from traditional cooperatives is its commitment to the Commons. Unlike most cooperatives, the CIC develops structures and tools, which are not reserved just for its members, but are accessible to everyone. For example, the alternative currency ‘eco’ (in its various forms) is used not only by the local exchange groups in Catalonia, but even in countries like Argentina, Brazil, France and Greece. The same applies to the IntegralCES platform, which can be used freely by any local exchange group around the world. Even more specialized tools, such as the ‘GestioGI’ invoice processing software which the CIC developed for its own internal use, are freely available on the Internet as free/open source software. That means anyone can download them and use them, without any obligation to become a member of the CIC. Similarly, the machines and agricultural tools developed by CIC’s XCTIT for the needs of the productive projects in CIC’s network in Catalonia are freely reproducible: their design information is freely available, giving anyone the ability to build them on their own and customize them according to their needs. In fact, even the model of CIC’s organization and operation is ‘open-source’ in the sense that the CIC actively encourages the development of autonomous projects aimed at reproducing its model in other places.

The same commitment to the Commons is reflected in CIC’s strategic goal for the development of a cooperative public system, in which health, food, education and housing are social goods that everyone has access to. Its efforts in that direction might have been partially fruitful so far, but this does not belittle their importance. Above all, it offers an example as well as a vision for the development of cooperatives which aim to benefit not only their fee-paying members, but the broader local community as well by providing it with free access to public benefit infrastructures.

However, this call for engagement with common goods should not be interpreted as a moral imperative or obligation. The motivation of cooperatives should not be philanthropy or altruism alone. As the Brazilian activist and philosopher Euclides Mance argues, common goods constitute strategic tools for the autonomy of cooperatives. A well-known example is how free software (like the Linux operating system) and open design technologies (like the agricultural machines for small producers developed by CIC’s XCTIT) can be used by cooperatives as ‘instruments of liberation’ to extricate themselves from a relationship of dependence on capitalist firms like Microsoft.[56] In fact, that is precisely the reason why the CIC places such importance on the use and development of free and open technology tools, as they ensure the technological sovereignty of the cooperative economy movement.

9. Summing up…

The CIC is without doubt an unconventional cooperative. It was created in the age of crisis by Catalan activists as an antisystemic strategy for the development of counter-structures from the bottom up. One would have to look very hard to find another cooperative, whose primary goal is not the provision of some service to its members, but the ‘creative destruction’ of the capitalist system.

As we have seen in chapter 4, the organizational core of the CIC is made up of ten committees, which cover a wide spectrum of activities. About half of them deal with the internal management and operation of the cooperative, while the rest focus on the provision of services and ‘tools’ as diverse as (a) legal assistance, (b) organizing the logistics in a Catalan-wide network of pantries run by local consumer groups, (c) providing funding (through CASX) to projects animated by the same ideological principles and (d) making tools and machines adapted to the needs of the productive projects in CIC’s network (like the agricultural tools for small farmers that have been developed by the XCTIT).

An interesting element in the organizational canvas of the CIC are the autonomous projects it collaborates with. As we remarked in chapter 5, although they are characterized by varying degrees of managerial autonomy, what is particularly important about them is the fact that they form a local network of productive projects animated by the same principles and values as the CIC, with which they collaborate in the context of the empowerment of the local cooperative economy.

Alongside these autonomous projects, the economic and territorial network of the CIC (which we discussed in chapter 6) encompasses a vibrant ecosystem of local exchange groups which are active in Catalonia. Based on direct exchange and the use of alternative community currencies, the way in which this ecosystem operates represents the model of the autonomous public market envisioned by the CIC as a means of satisfying the needs of the local community. That is, in short, the model proposed by the CIC for the transition to a post-capitalist economy: a local cooperative economy made up of a network of autonomous productive projects with common principles, which, in collaboration with local consumer groups and exchange networks, is able to provide the members of the community with the goods they need.

Acknowledgements

There are no words to adequately express my gratitude to the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) for its cooperation. From the very first moment I arrived in Catalonia, I was warmly received by the members of the cooperative, who did everything they could to help me in the research process. I shall not forget their hospitality and solidarity.

For the interviews they gave me, I would like to thank (in no particular order) Joel, Piquete and Xavier B. of the Communication Committee; Rakel B. and Jordi F. of the Coordination Committee; Dani N. and Luis David of the Reception Committee; Mai of the Economic Management Committee; Claudio and Mabel of the Legal Committee; Efkin and Pablo of the IT Committee; Marta S. and Hèctor M. from CASX and ΜaCUS; Miguel of the Common Spaces Committee; Αle F. of the Office of Housing and FairCoop; Elleflane from the XCTIT; Vadó of the CAC; Efkin and Maxigas from Calafou; Rosa from SOM Pujarnol and Sergio of the Productive Projects Committee.

Of the above persons, I am especially indebted to Joel of the Communication Committee. Joel organized several visits to projects related to the CIC (like SOM Pujarnol and Can Fugarolas) so that I could see them close up and devoted more time than any other CIC member to helping me understand the organizational structure of the CIC and its network. I am also hugely indebted to Luis Davis Arias Castaño for assisting me with the interviews in which I needed an interpreter. However, Luis David was not just my interpeter, but also an invaluable research collaborator. We jointly worked out the questions for the interviews we did and we thoroughly discussed the information we collected in that way.

A huge thanks is also due to my colleague from the P2P Foundation, Stacco Troncoso. Stacco’s contribution was decisive: in addition to finding funding for this research project, he was the colleague with whom I jointly worked out the ‘action plan’ for the research. I was also extremely lucky that he was in Barcelona during my first days in the city, putting me in touch with many useful contacts. I would like to thank him for everything he did for me and this project and hope he forgives me for being sometimes a rather difficult person to work with. Lastly, I would like to thank the Robin Hood Cooperative for funding this research.

[3]Inspired by the CIC and its principles, initiatives to set up ‘integral cooperatives’ have been formed in countries as far away as Argentina, attempting to adapt the ‘CIC model’ to their local context: an indicative example is the ‘Heraklion Integral Cooperative’ in the author’s home-town of Heraklion in Greece (see http://cooperativas.gr).

[4]Catalonia is well-known for its strong independence movement. We should not forget that most Catalans consider Catalonia a distinct national entity, with its own language, history and national identity. They are characterized by a culture of resistance, considering themselves an enslaved nation. To put it bluntly, they view the spanish state and its government as an apparatus of domination and oppression. Thus, not expecting any assistance from the official spanish state, they are firm in their conviction that they need to rely on their own strength for the development of their local economy. That is why Catalonia has such a long history of self-organization, which, to a large extent, accounts for the rich tradition this place has in cooperative projects. In this sense, CIC is a characteristically Catalan project: it is animated by the principle of self-organization, combined with a strong anti-statist sentiment and a cooperative culture with deep local roots.

[8]For those who wish to delve more deeply into the story of Duran, a very interesting ‘portrait’ can be found in Schneider, op. cit.

[9]FairCoop (http://fair.coop) is animated by the same ideological principles and values as the CIC. Most importantly, it provides services and ‘tools’ that are very similar to those offered by the CIC in Catalonia. For example, like the CIC, it has developed an electronic marketplace where FairCoop members can sell the products they make (https://fair.coop/fairmarket/). What, however, clearly differentiates FairCoop from the CIC is its ‘focus’: whereas the geographical epicentre of CIC’s activities is Catalonia, FairCoop is an international project with members from all over the world, rather than from Catalonia alone.

[10]In addition to the ‘permanent assemblies’, the CIC organizes ‘assembly days’ (the so-called ‘jornades assembleàries’) in the Catalan countryside, where its members have the opportunity to discuss important issues in a more relaxed and natural environment.

[11]That was not however the case during the first years of the CIC. In the beginning all committee members were strictly volunteers: the ‘basic income programme’ was launched a few years later.

[12]Interestingly enough, the amount of basic income received by committee members is not the same for everyone, but is determined in agreement between each member and the Committee of Coordination and Economic Management. To put it simply, members can ask for whatever amount of basic income they think they need to be able to work full-time. However, none of them currently receives more than 765 euros and 135 ecos per month.

[14]As Sebastián Reyna, the President of the Union of Professional and Working Self-employed People (UPTA) in Spain, explains: “autónomos pay a minimum flat rate of around €250 a month…these costs can appear prohibitive given that they have to be paid every month, no matter what you earn…even if you don’t have any work” (Reyna quoted in Mills, G. (2013) ‘Think hard before going self-employed in Spain’, The Local, Jun. 24, at https://www.thelocal.es/20130624/think-carefully-before-you-register-as-self-employed)

[15]The exact amount of the fee depends on the sum total of all the invoices issued (every three months) by a member, which means that the cost of the fee may rise considerably.

[33]In case that consensus is not possible among CASX members as to whether a project should be funded or not, the members supporting the funding proposal can do so by using their personal CASX deposits.

[36]As a characteristic example of that relationship, SOM Pujarnol performs the function of the CIC committee that is responsible for the recruitment and induction of new CIC members (the so-called ‘Acollida Comisión’) in the province of Garrotxa.

[39]Although Calafou has quite a few working groups, all of which have direct input into the assembly process, the presentations at ‘monographic’ assemblies are made only by the four most important ones (i.e. the working groups on economics, communication, renovation-restoration and productive projects).

[40]Productive projects have to pay a monthly rent of €1 for every square metre of space they occupy at Calafou.

]]>http://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/feed/117964Peer to Peer and the Commons: A matter, energy and thermodynamic perspectivehttp://commonstransition.org/peer-peer-commons-matter-energy-thermodynamic-perspective/
http://commonstransition.org/peer-peer-commons-matter-energy-thermodynamic-perspective/#commentsWed, 04 Oct 2017 07:00:17 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17851Commons Transition presents this report in two volumes by Céline Piques and Xavier Rizos, with the support of P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens. The Commons movement is facing a challenge: to articulate the optimum rate at which a resource can be harvested or used without damaging its ability to replenish itself. The next economy will […]

]]>Commons Transition presents this report in two volumes by Céline Piques and Xavier Rizos, with the support of P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens.

The Commons movement is facing a challenge: to articulate the optimum rate at which a resource can be harvested or used without damaging its ability to replenish itself.

The next economy will have to balance the needs of Earth’s expanding population with the shrinking level of resources which are available to everyone. This dynamic equilibrium is called carrying capacity. It is a middle path between the ‘entropic’ faster, geometric growth rates of human population, individual consumption and economic production, and the ‘negentropic’ slower, arithmetic replenishment rates of water, food and fossil fuels.

This means that the carrying capacity rate for renewable resources will have to follow a carefully guided policy of maintenance and sustenance to ensure that resources are replenished sustainably in meeting the needs of people. The carrying capacity rates of non-renewable resources are much more challenging and will have to be treated very differently. Society will have to decide scientifically how much non-renewable resources to use in the present and how much to save for the future.

This study in 2 volumes leads to an analysis of the thermodynamic downside of free trade and the thermodynamic potential relocalization of production and distribution.

The first volume of this research explores how scientists and thinkers have come to realise that thermodynamics teaches us that economic theory must take into consideration the constraints of our ecosystem. It also articulates why contrary to what classical economics implies, the possibility to decouple growth from resource use is a myth, and why the commons and commons-based peer production are the right paradigms for the new economy.

The second volume surveys current practices in agro-economics and the dynamics of resource replenishment. It is also a basis for undertaking a future structural analysis of the thermodynamics of relocalization. It shows with scenarios applied to food and fibre, non-renewable resources, and energy, how the commons economy help us overcome the impasse of unlimited growth.

“Those who see the world as a mechanism, a clock, do not look at the economy in the same way as those who see it as a deteriorating energy system,” said French economist René Passet.

Whilst the task of shifting our mindset from looking at a mechanism to looking at a deteriorating energy system, as well as designing new practical alternatives is enormous and might feel daunting, there is however “a light on the hill” provided by the various precursors, influencers, thinkers and practitioners who have collectively started to write the blueprint of this new paradigm.

Part I: Towards an economy that is embedded in, and recognizes, the limitations of our natural world

“The early classical economists intuited that some kind of dynamic balance was underpinning economics, and under the Newtonian influence, the price system became an incomplete and misaligned explanation of the essential relationship between resources and population. In other words, balancing supply and demand emerged as a weak substitute for balancing resources and population. Fast forward a few centuries, the Laws of Thermodynamics now give us the framework we need to consider to shift model, but they do not give us ‘how’ it should be done. The Commons, as an idea and practice, has emerged as a new social, political and economic dynamic that can provide this ‘how’.”

]]>http://commonstransition.org/peer-peer-commons-matter-energy-thermodynamic-perspective/feed/117851The History and Evolution of the Commonshttp://commonstransition.org/history-evolution-commons/
http://commonstransition.org/history-evolution-commons/#respondTue, 19 Sep 2017 10:50:46 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17888Is it possible to historicize the commons, to describe the evolution of the commons over time? This is our first draft and preliminary attempt to do so.

]]>Is it possible to historicize the commons, to describe the evolution of the commons over time? This is our first draft and preliminary attempt to do so.

To do this we must of course define the commons. We generally agree with the definition that was given by David Bollier and others and which derives from the work of Elinor Ostrom and the researchers in this tradition.

What are the Commons and P2P. Click to enlarge.

In this context, the commons has been defined as a shared resource, which is co-owned and/or co-governed by its users and/or stakeholder communities, according to its rules and norms. It’s a combination of a ‘thing’, an activity, commoning as the maintenance and co-production of that resource, and a mode of governance. It is distinguished from private and public/state forms of managing resources.

But it’s also useful to see commoning as one of four ways of distributing the fruits of a resource, i.e. as a ‘mode of exchange’, which is different from the more obligatory state-based redistribution systems, from markets based on exchange, and from the gift economy with its socially-pressured reciprocity between specific entities. In this context, commoning is pooling/mutualizing a resource, whereby individuals exchange with the totality of an eco-system.

A number of relational grammars, especially that of Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life, are very useful in that regard, as he distinguishes Authority Ranking (distribution according to rank), Equality Matching (the gift economy, as a social obligation to return a gift), Market Pricing and Communal Shareholding.

Kojin Karatani’s book about the Structure of World History is an excellent attempt to place the evolution of these modes of exchange, in a historical context. Pooling is the primary mode for the early tribal and nomadic forms of human organization, as ‘owning’ is counter-productive for nomads; the gift economy starts operating and becomes strongest in more complex tribal arrangements, especially after sedentarisation, since the social obligation of the gift and counter-gift, creates societies and pacifies relations. With the onset of class society, ‘Authority Ranking’ or re-distribution becomes dominant, and finally, the market system becomes dominant under capitalism.

Let’s now reformulate this in a hypothesis for civilisational, i.e. class history.

Class-based societies that emerged before capitalism, have relatively strong commons, and they are essentially the natural resource commons, which are the ones studied by the Ostrom school. They co-exist with the more organic culturally inherited commons (folk knowledge etc..). Though pre-capitalist class societies are very exploitative, they do not systematically separate people from their means of livelihood Thus, under for example European feudalism, peasants had access to common land.

With the emergence and evolution of capitalism and the market system, first as an emergent subsystem in the cities, we see the second form of commons becoming important, i.e. the social commons. In western history we see the emergence of the guild systems in the cities of the Middle Ages, which are solidarity systems for craft workers and merchants, in which ‘welfare’ systems are mutualized, and self governed. When market-based capitalism becomes dominant, the lives of the workers become very precarious, since they are now divorced from the means of livelihood. This creates the necessity for the generalization of this new form of commons,distinct from natural resources. In this context, we can consider worker coops, along with mutuals etc… as a form of commons. Cooperatives can then be considered as a legal form to manage social commons.

With the welfare state, most of these commons were state-ified, i.e. managed by the state, and no longer by the commoners themselves.There is an argument to be made that social security systems are commons that are governed by the state as representing the citizens in a democratic polity. Today, with the crisis of the welfare state, we see the re-development of new grassroots solidarity systems, which we could call ‘commonfare’, and the neoliberalisation and bureaucratisation of the welfare systems may well call for a re-commonification of welfare systems, based on public-commons partnerships.

Since the emergence of the Internet, and especially since the invention of web (the launch of the web browser in October 1993), we see the birth, emergence and very rapid evolution of a third type of commons: the knowledge commons. Distributed computer networks allow for the generalisation of peer to peer dynamics, i.e. open contributory systems where peers are free to join in the common creation of shared knowledge resources, such as open knowledge, free software and shared designs. Knowledge commons are bound to the phase of cognitive capitalism, a phase of capitalism in which knowledge becomes a primary factor of production and competitive advantage, and at the same time represent an alternative to ‘knowledge as private property’, in which knowledge workers and citizens take collective ownership of this factor of production.

To the degree that cognitive or network-based capitalism undermines salary-based work and generalized precarious work, especially for knowledge workers, these knowledge commons and distributed networks become a vital tool for social autonomy and collective organisation. But access to knowledge does not create the possibility for the creation of autonomous and more secure livelihoods, and thus, knowledge commons are generally in a situation of co-dependence with capital, in which a new layer of capital, netarchical capital, directly uses and extracts value from the commons and human cooperation.

But we should not forget that knowledge is a representation of material reality, and thus, the emergence of knowledge commons is bound to have an important effect on the modes of production and distribution.

I would then emit the hypothesis that this is the phase we have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.

The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the Belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation)[1].

Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’.

This means that they combine the following elements:

1) an open productive community with

2) a for-benefit infrastructure organisation that maintains the infrastructure of the commons and

3) generative (in the best case) livelihood organisations which mediate between the market/state and the commons in order to insure the social reproduction of the commoners (i.e. their livelihoods).

In our vision, these urban commons, which according to at least two studies [2] are going through an exponential phase of growth (a ten-fold growth in the last ten years), are the premise for a further deepening of the commons, preparing a new phase of deeper re-materialization.

We can indeed distinguish four types of commons according to two axes: material/immaterial, and co-produced/inherited.

Ostrom commons are mostly inherited material commons (natural resources); inherited immaterial commons, such as culture and language, are usually considered under the angle of the common heritage of humankind; knowledge commons are immaterial commons that are co-produced and finally, there is a largely missing category of material commons that are produced. We are talking here of what is traditionally called ‘capital’, but in the new context of an accumulation of the commons, rather than a accumulation of capital for the sake of capital.

Let’s see the logic of this.

In pre-capitalist class formations, where the land is a primary productive factor, natural resource commons are an essential resource of the livelihood of the commons, and it is entirely natural that the commons take the form of the common governance of natural resources tied to the land.

In capitalist formations, where the workers are divorced from access to land and the means of production, it is natural that the commons become ‘social’; they are the solidarity systems that workers need to survive, and they are the attempts to organize production on a different basis during the rule of capital, i.e. they can also take the form of cooperatives for production and consumption.

In an era of cognitive capitalism, knowledge becomes a primary resource and factor of production and wealth creation, and knowledge commons are a logical outcome. But the precarious workers that are in exodus from the salaried condition, cannot ‘eat’ knowledge. Therefore, the commons also take on the form of urban infrastructure and provisioning systems, but must ultimately also take the form of true physical and material productive commons. The commons are therefore potentially the form of a mode of production and industry appropriate to the current conjuncture. During a time of market and state failure regarding the necessary ecological transition, and heightened social inequality, commoning infrastructure becomes a necessity for guaranteeing access to resources and services, to limit unequal access, but also as a very potent means to lower the material footprint of human production.

Therefore, current urban and productive commons are also the seed forms of the new system which solves the problems of the current system, which combines a pseudo-abundance in material production which endangers the planet, and an artificial scarcity in knowledge exchange, which hinders the spread of solutions.

The knowledge commons of cognitive capitalism are but a transition to the productive commons of the post-capitalist era.

In this new form of material commons, which are heavily informed and molded by digital knowledge commons (hence ‘phygital’), the means of production themselves can become a pooled resource. We foresee a combination of shared global knowledge resources (for example, exemplified by shared designs, and following the rule: all that is light is global and shared), and local cooperatively owned and managed micro-factories (following the rule: all that is heavy is local).

This cosmo-local (DGML: design global, manufacture local) mode of production and distribution, has the following characteristics:

Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)

Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platfors

Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions

Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination

Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the eco-system.

In our opinion, the current wave of urban commons, is a prefiguration of the coming wave of scaled up material commons for the production and distribution of value in post-capitalist systems.

[1] See: http://wiki.commons.gent for a directory of these commons, classified by provisioning system, in Dutch.[2] The first study pertains to the Netherlands, and is a booklet with the text of a lecture by Tine De Moor, entitled ‘Homo Cooperans, delivered at her inauguration as Professor of Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective, August 30, 2013:
http://www.collective-action.info/sites/default/files/webmaster/_PUB_Homo-cooperans_EN.pdf

]]>http://commonstransition.org/history-evolution-commons/feed/017888A Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghenthttp://commonstransition.org/commons-transition-plan-city-ghent/
http://commonstransition.org/commons-transition-plan-city-ghent/#respondFri, 08 Sep 2017 00:11:24 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17833Michel Bauwens documents the emergence and growth of the Commons in Ghent and suggests the bests public policies to support commons-based initiatives.

This study [1] was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, a city in northern Flanders with nearly 300,000 inhabitants, with the support of its mayor Daniel Termont, the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city which consists of the Flemish Socialist Party SPA, the Flemish Greens (Groen) and the Flemish Liberal Party (Open VLD).

The request was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city, to offer some explanations of why this was occurring, and to determine what kind of public policies should support commons-based initiatives, based on consultation with the active citizens in Ghent.

The authors of the report are Michel Bauwens as investigator and Yurek Onzia as coordinator of the effort.

Timelab, an artistic makerspace under the leadership of Evi Swinnen, and the Greek scholar of the P2P Lab Vasilis Niaros, played important supportive roles in the realization of this project. Wim Reygaert and partners provided the graphics used in the original report. Annelore Raman coordinated the connections within the city council.

The consultation, which took place during the spring of 2017, took the form of:

A mapping of 500 or so commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (food, shelter, transportation, etc), through a wiki, which is available at http://wiki.commons.gent

80+ one to one interviews and conversations with leading commoners and project leaders

A written questionnaire that was responded to by over 70 participants

A series of 9 workshops in which participants were invited per theme, ‘Food as a Commons’, ‘Energy as a Commons’, ‘Transportation as a Commons’, etc ..

A Commons Finance Canvas workshop, based on the methodology developed by Stephen Hinton, which looked into the economic opportunities, difficulties and models used by the commons projects

The report consists of four parts.

The first part provides the context on the emergence of urban commons, which has seen a tenfold increase in the Flanders in the last ten years. It focuses on the challenge it represents for the city and the public authorities, for market players, and for traditional civil society organisations, and how the new contributive logic of the commons challenges (but also enriches) the logic of representation of the European democratic polities, in this specific case, at the level of a city. It also looks at the opportunities inherent in the new models such as more active participation of inhabitants in co-constructing their cities, in solving ecological and climate change challenges, and in creating new forms of meaningful work at the local level.

The second part is an overview of urban commons developments globally, but especially in European cities, and takes a closer look at the experiences in Bologna (with the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, now adopted by many other Italian cities), Barcelona (the pro-commons policies of the new political coalition of En Comu), Frome, UK (for its civic coalition that replaced the political parties in the running of the city), and Lille, for its experience with a Assembly of the Commons as a voice and expression of the local commons.

The third part is the analysis of the urban commons in Ghent itself, highlighting some of its strengths and weaknesses.

And finally, in the fourth part, based on our analysis in the three first parts, we offer our recommendations to the City, in terms of an institutional adaptation of the city to the new commons-centric demands that emerge through the commons activities. It’s a set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation. In some way, it represents the shift from urban commons to a more ambitious vision of the ‘city as a commons’.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and Vasilis (Billy) Niaros

The context for the Emergence of the Urban Commons

We define the commons as a shared resource, which is co-owned or co-governed by a community of users and stakeholders, under the rules and norms of that community. There is no commons without active co-production (commoning), and without an important measure of self-governance. Thus, it differs from both public and state- or city-owned goods, and from private property managed by its owners. Both a Dutch study by Tine De Moor (Homo Cooperans), and a study for the Flanders by the Oikos think thank have confirmed a steep rise in the number of commons-oriented civic initiatives (commons-oriented means that important aspects of the initiatives have commons’ aspects). This rise is related to a growing awareness amongst a layer of citizens that a social and ecological transition is necessary given the relative state and market failures, but also by the effects of the great economic and systemic crisis of 2008, which has seen an austerity-driven retreat from public authorities in terms of common infrastructures.

These new urban commons however do not exist ‘on their own’ as fully autonomous projects and entities but by necessity interact with both public and market forces, for access to resources and support.

Thus the commons is a challenge for the other institutions as well:

It is a challenge for the city, as commons are a claim to both public and private resources that were governed by the city, or which may have been private properties currently in disuse . Self-governance in the commons most often takes a contributory logic, i.e. the contributors and participants manage the projects, but this doesn’t necessarily involve all the citizenry. This also poses a challenge for representative democracy. Conversely, commoners may want support, but may resent control and limitations to their autonomy.

It is a challenge for market forces, which may feel challenged by commons projects as alternatives to privatized provision, or may profit from them in ways that are considered extractive by the commoners, or their actions may ‘enclose’ and destroy the commons, creating conflictual relations.

But is is also a challenge to established civil society organisations, which were based on memberships, a professional cadre, and bureaucratic forms of organisation and management; elements which are often rejected in the commons initiatives.

The commons requires a ‘partner’ city, which enables and empowers commons-oriented civic initiatives. It also requires generative market forms which sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors as well as facilitative types of support from civil society organisations.

An important discovery in our analysis of the 500+ urban commons projects in Ghent, is that their structure strongly resembles that of the commons-driven digital economy. This means that at the heart of urban commons we find:

Productive communities based on open contributions.

That these urban commons and their platforms may generate (and are obliged to if they are to be resilient and self-sustaining over time) generative market forms — i.e. entrepreneurial coalitions that have a positive relationship with the commons and the commoners.

The communities, platforms and possible market forms require, and receive, facilitative support from the various agencies and functionaries of the city, and the Civil Society Organisations, which have adapted to the needs of the new citizen-commoners.

This relationship is shown by the following graph:

Graphic 6: Polygovernance model.

This graph shows the five entry points of the commons economy in which the city is actively intervening (bottom), the 3 elements of the commons economy, and the public-commons processes and institutions which could be set up as a meta-structure to frame the cooperation between the city, the commoners and the generative economic entities.

It is also clear that the commons initiatives and their emerging economy, hold great potential for the social and economic life of the city.

The three main potentials are in our opinion the following:

The commons are an essential part of the ecological transition: shared and mutualized infrastructures have a dramatically lower footprint than systems based on ‘possessive individualism’, but on the condition that ‘it is done in the right’ and systemic way. A good counter-example is how the competition between drivers in the Uber model negates the environmental advantages of ride-hailing. Huge reductions in the material footprint (and carbon footprint) are possible with the commons-centric models.

The commons are a means for the re-industrialization of the city following the cosmo-local model which combines global technical cooperation in knowledge commons with smart re-localization of production; an example is how city procurement could be used to reintroduce healthy local meals for children in public schools (5 million a year, not counting other anchor institutions which could join); a combination between procurement from the urban/rural short-circuit farmers in the organic sector, carbon-free transportation (Ghent is flat, which allows for bike-cargo transport), and local cooking, would create hundreds of jobs for the local economy. Socially, this means jobs not just for the technically-savvy but for the desperate blue collar workers who have been hit hard by the ecologically unsustainable neoliberal globalization model

Representative democracy is, for a number of interlocking reasons, in deep crisis and facing a crisis of trust. And the world of production is still nearly entirely un-democratic. The commons however are based on the self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation. Inclusive and diverse commons could be at the very least an adjunct to representative democracy, creating a system of Democracy+, augmented with participation , deliberation and multi-stakeholder governance models in cooperation with the commons initiatives.

The analysis of the situation in Ghent

The city of Ghent is a dynamic city of nearly 300k inhabitants including a huge number of young people and students. It’s a city in which the commons already have a distinct presence, with support from an active and engaged city administration.

A tradition of center-left coalitions have created a distinct political and administrative culture with many engaged city officials. The city is actively engaged in carbon reduction, traffic reduction, and has neighborhood and social facilitators, connectors in schools, street workers and other types of staff that is actively engaged in enabling roles at the local level. This includes different kinds of support for commons-initiatives.

The city has an important policy to support the temporary use by community groups of vacant land and buildings.

The city counts around 500 commons-oriented initiatives in all sectors of human provisioning, such as food, shelter, mobility, etc. Many of these are active around the necessity of socio-ecological transitions in their respective domains and neighborhoods.

These positive aspects should be tempered by the following issues:

Both the efforts of the city and the commoner’s initiatives are highly fragmented;

There are many regulatory and administrative hurdles to hinder the expansion of commons initiatives, for example in the field of mutualized housing; (for example, we received a 7 page memo of such obstacles from housing activists).

Though there are a number of fablabs/coworking spaces and some craft-related initiatives, there is at present a lack of activity around open design linked to real production;

Though blessed with a large university, which is active around sustainability issues, there is very little evidence of relations between the university and the commons projects, and some of its spinoffs and players are sometimes distinctly hostile to open source and design projects;

Though many of the leading commons activists are facing precarious lifestyles and incomes, they usually have good social and knowledge capital and mostly consist of long established inhabitants. There are many commons project in the post-migration communities, but they are mostly limited to ethnic and religious memberships, and there is as yet relatively little cross-over. They are however successful counter-examples such as the initiatives in the neighborhood Rabot.

Old and newer Civil Society Organisations play a significant infrastructural and support role for maintaining urban commons projects, but perhaps perceive them to be mainly directed towards vulnerable population groups and not as key and highly productive resources.

Despite the city support, the major potential commons are largely enclosed and vulnerable to private extraction; the current models do not challenge the mainstream consensus but find a way to co-exist with the major imbalances.

Despite its long history of self-organization with the guilds in the middle ages and a very strong labor movement in the 19th century, the cooperative sector and its support mechanisms are quite weak; there is a weak if not inexistent support infrastructure for a specifically generative and cooperative economy that could work with commons infrastructures.

The proposals for the city administration

The general logic of our proposals is to put forward realistic but important institutional innovations that can lead to further progress and expansion of the urban commons in Ghent in order to successfully achieve its ecological and social goals. We propose public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners in every field of human provisioning.

We are not summarizing all proposals here, merely the underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Commons initiatives can forward their proposals and need for support to a City Lab, which prepares a ‘Commons Accord’ between the city and the commons initiative, modeled after the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. Based on this contract, the city sets-up specific support alliances which combine the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the generative private sector, in order to organize support flows.

The model comes from the existing practice around the food transition, which is far from perfect and has its problems, but nevertheless has in our opinion the core institutional logic that can lead to more successful outcomes.

The city has indeed created an initiative, Gent en Garde, which accepts the five aims of civil society organisations active in the food transition (local organic food, fairly produced), which works as follows. The city has initiated a Food Council, which meets regularly and could contribute to food policy proposals. The Food Council is representative of the current forces at play, and has both the strength and weaknesses of representative organisations. The Food Council contain a contributive ‘food working group’ which mobilizes those effectively working at the grassroots level on the food transition by following a contributive logic, where every contributor has a voice. In our opinion, this combination of representative and contributory logic is what can create a super-competent Democracy+ institution that goes beyond the limitations of representation and integrates the contributive logic of the commoners. But how can the commoners exert significant political weight?. This requires voice and self-organisation. We therefore propose the creation of an Assembly of the Commoners, for all citizens active in the co-construction of commons, and a Chamber of the Commons, for all those who are creating livelihoods around these commons, in order to create more social power for the commons.

This essential process of participation can be replicated across the transition domains, obtaining city and institutional support for a process leading to Energy as a Commons, Mobility as a Commons, Housing, Food, etc.

We also propose the following: (not exhaustive)

The creation of a juridical assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unblock the potential for commons expansion, by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.

The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups.

The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models.

Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings, towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.

Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy.

Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternative in as many cities).

Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences etc.

As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘calls for commons’, instead of competitive contests between individual institutions. Calls for the commons would reward the coalition that creates the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation.

We also propose

A specific project to test the capacity of ‘cosmo-local production’ to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement.

The organisation of a CommonsFest on the 28th of October, with a first Assembly of the Commons.

A pilot project around ‘circular finance’ in which ‘saved negative externalities’ which lead to savings in the city budget can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (say re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers).

The setting up of an experimental production unit based on distributed manufacturing and open design.

Projects that integrate knowledge institutions such as the university, with the grassroots commons projects.

[1] A translated version of the full-length Dutch report can be found here. Suggested citation: Commons Transitie Plan voor de Stad Gent. Michel Bauwens en Yurek Onzia. Ghent, Belgium: City of Ghent and P2P Foundation, 2017Header photo by estefaniabarchietto

]]>http://commonstransition.org/commons-transition-plan-city-ghent/feed/017833Cities Against the Wallhttp://commonstransition.org/cities-against-the-wall/
http://commonstransition.org/cities-against-the-wall/#respondWed, 30 Aug 2017 11:41:38 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17817Two years into its governing mandate, how is Spain’s municipalist movement fighting back against the impositions of global capital?

]]>Two years into its governing mandate, how is Spain’s municipalist movement fighting back against the impositions of global capital?

By now, the story is well-known in left-wing circles. Two years ago, a handful of civic platforms won municipal elections in most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Cádiz and Santiago, among others. Spearheaded by prominent figures from the local social movements, they joined Podemos and various left-wing parties in campaigns that promised nothing short of a democratic revolution. In the aftermath of a brutal economic crash and an outbreak of corruption scandals, they would respond to the profound crisis of legitimacy affecting the Spanish state with a program of radical municipalism, channeling the bottom-up politics of the indignados movement that won hearts and minds in 2011.

Having reached the halfway point of their first mandate, it seems like a good time to ask whether and how the jump from the streets to the institutions has helped advance the demands of the social movements from which these candidacies derived their legitimacy. Have the possibilities for emancipatory systemic change grown and multiplied in this time? Or has neoliberal institutionality converted and absorbed an entire generation of its opponents into its structure? These are complex questions. To begin to answer them, we might first consider the scale of the challenges facing these cities in the current stage of global capitalism. We’ll focus first on the signature issue on which many of the activists who became politicians built their legitimacy: the right to decent housing.

The Great Wall of Money

Walking around Sants or similar working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, you’re likely to see several flyers offering to buy apartments. Some are handwritten, others are printed out in Arial or Comic Sans fonts. They contain little information besides a first name and a phone number. Some are simply anonymous. But though their appearances may vary, they tend to lead to the same phone numbers.

An investigative report by the autonomous weekly La Directa revealed that these flyers can be traced back to a handful of companies that have been buying up entire residential blocks, often with renters still living in them. They then persuade tenants to leave their homes, renovate the building and either sell it or rent the flats out at higher prices. How the companies persuade tenants to leave varies. They might offer cash, drastically raise rent or simply refuse to renew a rental contract. When tenants resist, they hire companies like Desokupa (“Unsquat”) to forcefully remove them, providing gainful employment to beefy fascists and often breaking the law in the process.This practice tends to be depicted in the media as a local problem in which a handful of unscrupulous businesses exploit loopholes and legal grey areas to turn a profit. But it goes far beyond Barcelona. Companies like these are the shock troops of a massive rent bubble that is affecting all of Spain’s major cities. According to leading Spanish property website Idealista, rental prices increased across the country by 15.9 percent in 2016 alone, with year-over-year growth rates approaching 20 percent during the first trimester of 2017 in places like Barcelona, San Sebastian and the Canary and Balearic Islands. At the neighborhood level, the numbers are simply staggering. In places like the Sant Martí and Sant Andreu districts of Barcelona, rental prices have increased by over 30 percent relative to the same time last year.

Few can deal with such sharp increases. As a result, longtime residents are being displaced from their neighborhoods by what real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield has dubbed “The Great Wall of Money,” a massive pot of capital for global real estate investment worth about $435 billion. As former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Raquel Rolnik describes it, the Great Wall of Money is a floating cloud of finance capital seeking to materialize in a way that evokes colonization. “I deliberately use the term ‘colonization’ because it involves territorial occupation and cultural domination,” she explains in a recent lecture at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. “This colonization has just one objective: to extract rent by opening up new frontiers that are capable of generating interest for finance capital.”

While the use of colonization as a metaphor is problematic for its erasure of slavery and genocidal violence, what is certain is that governments thirsting for foreign investment are competing to land this capital in their countries despite its distinct lack of interest in the lives of residents. In Spain’s case, the country recently attracted the Wall of Money by becoming an emerging market for real estate investment trusts, or REITs. These are companies owning income-generating real estate that can be either residential or commercial. The vast majority of that income must be derived from rent and paid out to shareholders as dividends.

REITs were introduced as a legal form in Spain in 2009 under a Socialist Party government. Initially, they were unsuccessful due to a corporate tax rate of 19 percent. But in 2012, Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government exempted REITs from this tax. It was after this reform took effect that rental prices took off across the country. Alongside developments like the rise of rent-extracting platforms such as Airbnb — which blur the line between residential and commercial properties or formal and informal economies — the central government’s measure breathed new life into the very sector that provoked Spain’s economic crisis in the first place. The work of managing its most dire effects was left to the municipal governments.

Cornered by the State and the Market

It is safe to say that, in Spain, the degree of conflict between city governments and the territory- and rent-seeking finance capital of the Great Wall of Money is at its highest in Barcelona. This is unsurprising, since it is here that both the Spanish housing movement and the municipalist wave were born. Barcelona is also where the link between the movements and the electoral platform is most robust, and the line between activists and representatives is haziest. At the local level, this is common knowledge that can be written off as a talking point. For outside observers, however, it is helpful to consider what this looks like on any ordinary day.

Recently, Barcelona En Comú councilwoman Gala Pin went on the agenda-setting Catalan morning show Els matins and confronted the co-founder of MK Premium, the most prominent of the property vultures identified by La Directa’s investigative report. In a heated exchange, she characterized MK Premium’s work as violencia inmobiliaria, or “property violence.” Her choice of words matched the discourse of the housing platform she helped lead before becoming a representative, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Mortgage Victims Platform (PAH). As a result of her choice of words, she was accused of demagoguery by the right-wing opposition and sued by MK Premium for slander.

Pin’s nods to the housing movement go beyond mere rhetoric. She often uses her large following on social media to make evictions visible and boost efforts to stop them. “Tomorrow we have five evictions,” reads a typical post. “Despite our efforts, we need collaboration to stop one. Arc del Teatre Street, 9:30am.”

These posts have been criticized in some radical-left circles as either being propagandistic or preemptively deflecting blame for the evictions that do take place under Barcelona En Comú’s watch. Others argue that Pin and other council members using this approach are simply being transparent about the limits of institutional power and calling on people to overcome them when this is unjust. What is clear is that the approach is effective. The resulting mobilizations have stopped numerous evictions, and even more have been stopped by the network of housing offices that the city government revamped to mediate between tenants and landlords.

This is just one example of how tension between social movements, local representatives and public administration can be used to strengthen resistance against the impositions of higher-level institutions and economic forces. And Barcelona is not the only city where the municipal government has become more porous to pressure from below. Manuela Carmena’s Ahora Madrid, for instance, have opened the city’s participation system up to citizen-initiated proposals and, like other cities, allocated a portion of the city coffers to participatory budgeting. In Valencia, where progressive green coalition Compromís governs with the support of Valencia En Comú and the Spanish Socialist Party, the city is undertaking a massive shift towards a pedestrian and bike-centered model of sustainable urban mobility. And in Zaragoza, grid electricity is now 100 percent renewable and energy spending has been reduced by nearly 15 percent.

All of these cities have disproven the European Union’s “no alternative” dogma about austerity by increasing social spending and expanding the public housing stock while maintaining balanced budgets and, in some cases, even reducing deficits. They are also pressuring the central government to take in more refugees, and some are defying Rajoy’s racist 2012 healthcare reform by providing universal healthcare regardless of one’s documentation status. In Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, city governments have repeatedly expressed their desire to close immigrant detention centers, citing human rights violations and taking symbolic and legal actions against them as a result.

These are by no means revolutionary measures. Taken together, they amount to a straightforward social-democratic program combined with green urbanism and participatory governance. But in Europe’s current political climate, polarized as it is by neoliberal technocracy and the ultra-nationalist far right, this is nothing to sneeze at. What makes their defense of the most basic social advances of the last several decades all the more noteworthy is that it has been carried out by minority governments in a highly fragmented political system.

But this success is fragile against the power of the state and the whims of the market. To impose austerity on cities with left-wing governments, the central government merely has to enforce the legislation it passed in 2013 to dramatically reduce municipal autonomy. Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro has already made his intent to do so abundantly clear. Meanwhile, the rent bubble continues to expand, pushing residents out of their homes and further from the urban center. Cornered by these looming threats, cities cannot afford to limit their efforts to holding the fort — they must also push back.

A Dynamic of Conflict and Complicity

In early June 2017, several neighborhood marches converged at the Plaça Universitat in the center of Barcelona. From there, a crowd of three thousand people ambled through Sant Antoni, Poble Sec and the Raval, three of the areas targeted by the Great Wall of Money. At several points, they stopped in front of specific housing blocks where tenants were resisting the efforts of speculators to kick them out. When they reached the end of their route, protesters cracked open a block of ten flats that had been abandoned for eight years and squatted it.

The march was the latest action in a growing cycle of struggles against the new property bubble. Organized by a platform called Barcelona No Està en Venda (“Barcelona Is Not For Sale”), it brought together several neighborhood assemblies that have sprung up in the last two years to fight displacement by illegal tourist flats and rising rent. It also included the Sindicat de Llogaters, a local Renters’ Union that took shape in early 2017, as well as the anarcho-syndicalist CGT union, the Barcelona Federation of Neighborhood Associations, the Neighborhood Assemblies for Sustainable Tourism and the PAH.

Actions like these set the agenda of public debate, forcing governments and political parties to demonstrate their priorities. In this particular case, it wrested the microphone away from the establishment press, which had hoped to frame recent conflicts between the City of Barcelona, Airbnb and the tourism lobby as one of “touristophobia,” to borrow the term introduced by El País. Instead of complying with an anti-tourist framework — which has racist, classist and xenophobic undertones — the social movements have centered conflict on the property bubble and gentrification. For the most part, Barcelona En Comú have adopted this framing, albeit in confrontation with some sectors of the movement regarding how to target speculators.

This dynamic of conflict and complicity between movements and left-wing parties is particularly visible in Barcelona because the city’s long history of bottom-up organizing has produced a thick social fabric. During the institutional turn that gave way to Barcelona En Comú, the biggest risk was that the transfer of notable activists from the streets to the institutions would produce something like a “brain drain,” gutting and weakening the social movements. But a look at the social conflicts that have taken place since that turn reveals a somewhat different scenario.

Barcelona En Comú has been relatively effective in translating the demands of the social movements that its individual members came from into public policy proposals. They have been less effective in dealing with the demands of movements they had little experience with previously, such as the city’s street vendors and public transport workers. As a result, these movements have emerged as protagonists in the city’s current structure of social antagonism. How the tensions they produce are resolved remains to be seen.

In Madrid, however, there is far less complicity between the social movements and the municipal platform, and far more confrontation. Though its system of primaries was more open than Barcelona En Comú’s, the confluence of organizations that gave way to Ahora Madrid is much more fractured. Moreover, their consensus candidate, current mayor and former judge Manuela Carmena, comes from a much more institutional background than those leading municipalist platforms in other cities.

The difference shows. Carmena has bucked the party’s program on several occasions, using the cult of personality around her and Spain’s “presidentialist” model of municipal governance to isolate herself from criticism by the more radical organizations integrated into Ahora Madrid, such as Ganemos and the Anticapitalistas wing of Podemos. The most disturbing symptom of this divide is the fact that El Patio Maravillas, the squat where Ahora Madrid was conceived, is set to become a block of tourist flats. Here, the gap between the movement and the institution broke ground for the Wall of Money.

Municipalism with a Purpose

For Spain’s municipalist platforms, the problem is that municipalism on its own is not an ideology. It is a form of governance. It can just as well be capitalist or communist, totalitarian or libertarian, nationalist or internationalist. Left open, it is just a brand to fill with capital or an excuse to transfer blame to other instantiations of administrative power. Moreover, an overly simplistic understanding of municipalism risks steamrolling over the conflicts between differing types of municipalities and the power imbalances produced by decades of urbanization and globalization. This is particularly relevant when we consider the profound cultural and political cleavage that has emerged in the Global North as a result of urban extractivism, which pits progressive growing cities against nativist depopulating villages.

To break with the narrow limits and toxic relationships of the neoliberal status quo and avoid becoming a mere vehicle for the reproduction of administrative and territorial self-interest, an emancipatory municipalism requires a horizon to walk towards. This is precisely what social movements provide. In every injustice that they denounce lies a way the world should be and a set of values and practices suppressed by the current social order. From a leftist perspective, these are none other than mutual aid and solidarity.

Materializing values as practices is a cultural and ideological task more than it is a technical one. The logic of governance, in contrast, is mostly technical. As such, it is centered on control and predictability. To avoid being subsumed by that logic of control and predictability, it is not enough for the new representatives to take on the demands of the movements that put them in power. They must instead nurture all of the movements growing in the cracks of the institutional architecture they’ve inherited, as it is precisely these cracks that the Wall of Money seeks to fill with concrete.

The beauty of the Spanish municipal platforms’ electoral victories two years ago was that their very existence was not predicted by the technical logic of governance. This is why municipal gatekeepers view them as a democratic error. What they have now is an opportunity to dismantle that architecture and open it up to the people, movements and memories that have been repressed, erased, exploited or ignored until now. Going forward, their challenge will be to create more uncertainty for speculators and less for those who hope to inhabit the city.

Carlos Delclós is a sociologist, researcher and editor for ROAR Magazine. His research interests include international migration, social stratification, fertility, urban sociology, social movements and cultural theory.

]]>This Commons Transition Special Report was originally authored by Jessica Gordon Nembhard for The Next System Project’s series of publications on systemic alternatives.It is now republished here with special permission from the author and original publisher. As the Next System project explains:

We have commissioned these papers in order to facilitate an informed and comprehensive discussion of “new systems,” and as part of this effort we have also createda comparative framework which provides a basis for evaluating system proposals according to a common set of criteria.

In this report, Nembhard lays out the vision for a 21st century Cooperative Commonwealth characterised by interlocking ownership and solidarity structures. As always, we’ve indexed the report. You can read it sequentially or jump to any of the sections below. You can also read the originalin PDF formator consult the different sections and comment on the document in the Commons Transition Wiki.

Introduction

The next system that we need, and that hopefully we are moving toward, is a cooperative commonwealth within interlocking local solidarity economies. Such a system is created from the bottom up, building upon multiple grassroots cooperative enterprises, and democratic community-based economic practices. These networks collaborate and federate from the local to municipal, regional, national, and international levels.

What is a Cooperative?

Before defining a cooperative commonwealth, it is important to describe its major features. Cooperatives are companies owned by the workers or the people who use their services. These member-owners form the company for a particular purpose: to satisfy an economic or social need, to provide a quality good or service (one that the market is not adequately providing) at an affordable price, or to create an economic structure to engage in needed production or facilitate more equal distribution. Cooperatives are jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprises that range from very small in size to large corporations. A cooperative enterprise is based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity, as well as accountability and transparency. And, it must operate democratically, according to a set of principles—set by the International Co-operative Alliance—that include open membership, equal voting rights for each member regardless of how much is invested (“one person, one vote”), returns based on use, continuous education, and concern for the community.[1] Cooperatives are classified into three major categories, depending on the relationship between the member-owners and the cooperative’s purpose: consumer-owned, producer-owned, or worker-owned (or some combination of the three).

What is a Cooperative Commonwealth?

By a cooperative solidarity commonwealth, I mean a system of interlocking cooperative ownership structures in all industries and all sectors of the economy, where cooperatives and other community-based enterprises support one another by building linked supply chains, collaborating on projects, and sharing funding. These interconnections start locally but build into regional, national, and international interlocking structures, as needed (and as is rational).

For example, in a cooperative commonwealth, a credit union helps to develop worker cooperatives, provides financial services to cooperative members and low-interest loans to cooperative stores (to buy a building, for instance) and housing cooperatives. The cooperative store deposits its money in the credit union, and increases its reserves so it can make more community loans. The housing cooperative members run their own management, security, and maintenance companies as worker-owned cooperatives that also service the credit union and the cooperative store, and use the credit union for their financial services. The residents also own cooperative sewing factories, catering enterprises, childcare centers, and home care facilities, which sell to, and use the services of, the other cooperatives. The model can also encompass industrial cooperatives in recycling, alternative energy production, laundry services, and manufacturing. The links are made wherever member-owners use the services of, or buy supplies from, other cooperatives and community-based enterprises. In this system, everybody is part of several different, but interlinked, cooperatives. The interlinked cooperatives also help one another out and work together on issues of social need. For instance, in the case that one cooperative goes through financial challenges or additional affordable housing is needed in the community, some of the surplus from a profitable cooperative can be directed towards these needs. Bartering, gifting, and fair trade relationships are all incorporated into these activities and exchanges (see below under solidarity system).

What is a Solidarity System?

The term cooperative can be loosely defined to include any kind of economic cooperation in a solidarity system, but my definition privileges cooperative ownership and cooperative enterprises. By solidarity system, I mean a non-hierarchical, non-exploitative, equitable set of economic relationships and activities geared toward the grassroots—that’s of the people (people before profit), indigenous, participatory, based on human needs, humane values, and ecological sustainability.[2] In the solidarity system, surplus, or profit, is shared in equitable ways, through democratic decision making, and used for the common good. Risks are collectivized, skills are perfected, learning is continuous, and economic practices are sustainable (both ecologically and from a business point of view), bringing collective prosperity. Capital is democratized and widely owned or controlled. In this system, capital is subordinate to labor, as in David Ellerman’s sense (labor rents capital rather than capital renting labor);[3] and returns go to labor rather than to capital.[4] In a solidarity system, we follow the guidelines of seventh generation thinking and are stewards of the commons, mother earth, and our ecology.[5]

By solidarity system, I mean a non-hierarchical, non-exploitative, equitable set of economic relationships and activities geared toward the grassroots—that’s of the people (people before profit), indigenous, participatory, based on human needs, humane values, and ecological sustainability.

It is also a system where marginalized and oppressed people use their sense of solidarity (gained from experiencing similar racial, social, political, cultural, and/ or economic domination and exploitation) to motivate them to join together economically to combat their oppressions and economic exclusion and exploitation. The sense of solidarity also helps to keep the group together, and is a basis for establishing trust within the group.

A solidarity system recognizes the evils of racism, sexism, and patriarchy and deliberately addresses oppression and exclusion by developing values, policies, and practices to mitigate them. It aims to give voice and power to those who are usually without them.

The notion is that there is not any one group, or one person, running off with all the “spoils.” The wealth and prosperity are truly recirculating in the community. And community members, especially those who do the work and need the resources to live, are the ones who decide what happens to the resources. In a system that includes shared prosperity, shared decision making, and collective economic activity, economic democracy spills over into other social and political spaces, and enriches civil society, as well as family and individual wellness.

Social Energy

Of particular importance, but that we don’t talk about enough, is the fact that resources are not solely financial. It’s not just about market relationships. In fact, we should be able to do away with the price system, as African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois hoped. Very early in the 1900s, he wrote that African Americans should be at the forefront of creating intelligent cooperation that would dismantle the price system and set up an economy based on the common good, supporting the common good.

It is now our business to give the world an example of intelligent cooperation so that when the new industrial commonwealth comes we can go into it as an experienced people and not again be left on the outside as mere beggars. … [I]f leading the way as intelligent cooperating consumers, we rid ourselves of the ideas of a price system and become pioneer servants of the common good, we can enter the new city as men and not mules.[6]

And so this system that I’m describing would not be so dependent on market forces and a price system, but would be more about human need and human relationships—an economic cooperative ecology of caring community. This would include not just whether you bring capital to an economic venture, but what other resources and agency you bring, and how you participate with others (social capital).

One of my colleagues, Curtis Haynes at Buffalo State University, uses the concept of social energy, which was inspired by Du Bois.[7] Haynes explains social energy as not just sweat equity—where you earn equity because of the work you put in, the in-kind work—but also the other kinds of energies, such as the enthusiasm, caring, and the persistence that you put in to support the business and keep the business going. Social energy is about the quality of social interactions cooperators put in, and the support they provide for the good of the enterprise and for their fellow cooperators. It’s a type of social capital, according to Haynes. So much of the productivity in, and success of, cooperatives and solidarity economy relationships results from that kind of energy and the quality of social relationships, the trust and leadership that are built. It’s not just the money put in or the hours worked but, more importantly, it is about this energy—the connections made with other people, how we work together to solve problems, make decisions, and how and when we take leadership (agency). Understanding that this social energy is just as important as financial contributions is another way to think about “the new system,” and another way to think about how we democratize capital. It’s about enthusiasm, caring, persistence, and concern for community. We need democratic, people-centered, community-based, collective, sustainable economies that produce prosperity for all and protect mother earth.

Digging deeper

1. Core Goals

The core goals of a cooperative solidarity commonwealth are to: create sustainable economic prosperity for all; eliminate poverty, billionaires, economic inequality, racism, sexism and discrimination; and increase local democratic control over economic activity, capital, and collective wealth. The aim is to develop a cooperative solidarity economy that embraces the following:

economic democracy;

humane social and economic values;

just, non-exploitative relationships;

democratic participation;

diversity;

equity;

ecological sustainability;

the dignity of work;

the visibility of invisible productivity (particularly child rearing, elder care, and home making);

2. Major Changes

To achieve a cooperative solidarity economy, we need more cooperative ownership and democratic governance of economic enterprises. We need widely-available information, education, and training about how to run an enterprise democratically and how to start a cooperative. Then we need to develop interlocking supply chains and federations among cooperative and community-owned enterprises, to strengthen and stabilize them. Other elements that will contribute to creating a cooperative solidarity economy are wage solidarity and living wages, profit sharing, affordable housing, criminalizing subprime and predatory lending, and providing free higher education. Wage solidarity means equitable wages and salaries in a workplace, such that there is little difference between the highest paid and the lowest paid employees. A wage ratio of six to one, or less, is optimal. All wages and salaries must be living wages with full benefits and include profit sharing, if not actual ownership. Without these features a solidarity economy cannot exist. Many cooperatives and networks of cooperatives feature these elements and, where it is already a practice, cooperatives will be more competitive and the step to increasing the number of cooperatives will be shorter.

In addition, it should be illegal to use subprime or predatory lending practices (for interest rates greater than 3 percent above prime, for example), and engage in debt peonage (such as share cropping). These practices keep people in poverty by keeping them in debt or preventing them from accessing capital. Indebtedness and lack of capital are two of the greatest reasons for low wealth and poverty. Furthermore, we need access to non-predatory capital to help people finance their economic endeavors and contribute their equity to cooperative businesses or cooperative housing. Along with prohibiting predatory lending, the society should privilege community development credit unions, cooperative banks, non-exploitative community development financial institutions, and regional public banks, as the preferred financial institutions. Historically, these institutions have provided affordable financial services, recirculated capital in communities, been organized with community boards, and practiced democratic governance.

Housing should not cost more than 20 percent of income, since those who pay more than 30 percent are considered “burdened” (in the 1940s affordable housing policy required that no one pay more than 20 percent of their income in housing costs).[8] Truly affordable housing is essential, and really, housing should not be commodified. Housing should not be part of speculative real estate. Again this would help to eliminate poverty and increase economic stability, but also would free up people’s income to feed their families, buy their equity share of a cooperative business, or to invest in cooperative business education and development. If all housing were 30 percent of income or less, we would not need limited equity housing cooperatives, but people could still use housing cooperatives as one model for home ownership.

Since education is so important, a BA degree should be free, with a stipend that covers the cost of living for anyone enrolled as a full-time student. Here, again, if a college education were free, not only would more people obtain a BA, but also most student debt would be eliminated. With little to no debt, people could afford to buy their share in a cooperative business and invest in their communities. Free education could be paid for by taxes on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana. In addition, we need to require cooperative and solidarity economics literacy from kindergarten to college. There should be a core curriculum at each grade level for appropriate content and practical experience with cooperative economics and solidarity economic principals.

We also need to change our focus from a consumer society to a producer society— producing goods and services to satisfy needs not for mere consumption, and not for profit solely.

We also need to change our focus from a consumer society to a producer society— producing goods and services to satisfy needs not for mere consumption, and not for profit solely. This will mean producing and buying things locally as much as possible. Also, there will be no need for advertising, especially not aggressive advertising. Marketing will be more about the sharing of information, so that people can learn about and judge what products are best for them and their family or company, and coordinate trade, exchange, and transportation of goods and services. With a focus on education, knowledge, and the common good, there will be no need for superficiality and the stretching of the truth that has become the hallmark of advertising. And since advertising makes us (and especially our children) feel that we not only want, but need, things that we don’t really need and/ or can’t afford, without advertising, we can concentrate on teaching the values of a solidarity economy and the skills to engage in democratic economic participation.

3. Principal Means

Universal cooperative laws and enabling legislation, along with many of the policy changes mentioned above, would go a long way to helping us to expand cooperative ownership and implement a cooperative solidarity economy. Public bank development, and public bank and credit union loans for cooperative development, are necessary. Wealth tax and foreign transaction taxes are some of the ways to reduce wealth inequality and increase monies available to the new public banks. Non-predatory interest rate policies (as discussed above) are essential. Models such as the Mondragón cooperatives in Spain used the credit union not only as the major banking institution, but also as the driver of cooperative development, in terms of business development strategies and financing.[9] And very early on the Mondragón credit union, Caja Laboral Popular, sponsored research and development for cooperative businesses.[10]

As mentioned above, widespread cooperative and solidarity economics education, at all grade levels, in all educational institutions and through community-based cooperative academies, is essential. We must all know and understand cooperatives and the solidarity economy better than we understand capitalism. Cooperative solidarity economic exchanges must be considered the norm for how we relate to each other economically.

The strategy to implement cooperative ownership should start with local grassroots solidarity economic practices that connect with each other and with cooperative businesses, suppliers, procurers, and regional associations. We also need to develop and strengthen sector associations, and regional, national, and international federations. We will increasingly need policies that support solidarity economy entity development (business, financial, investment, and educational). All this will lead to more formal and larger cooperative enterprises that interlock and supply each other. Through the practice of local economic democracy and cooperative ownership, we will develop more of such enterprises and increase the demand for enabling and supportive policies and legislation. Moreover, converting existing businesses into worker cooperatives is another strategy that does not require starting from scratch. Organizations such as the Democracy at Work Institute have focused on developing scalable models and policies to support this practice.[11] In the case of converting an already-existing business into a cooperative, employees already know how to run the business. What they need is more exposure to the model, training in running a democratic business, and support in converting to a worker-owned economic organization. This can happen organically, as owners decide to sell to their employees, or through education initiatives that encourage workers to buy businesses in which owners are set to retire soon.

4. Geographic Scope

This model will start in the United States, especially with low-income people of color and their allies, progressives, and labor. However, many other countries are farther ahead than we are, and provide strategies and models that we can use. Therefore, better connection to the cooperative solidarity economies that already exist is also important. My focus here, however, is on how we can transform the United States into a cooperative solidarity economy, since it’s the belly of the beast of neocolonialism, economic inequality, discrimination, and oppression. Even in this context, we have pockets of solidarity economy practices and initiatives in the United States that should be continued, strengthened, and expanded, such as: the Democracy at Work Institute, the Southern Grassroots Economies Project, the Union-Coop Initiative with the United Steel Workers, the One Worker One Vote initiative, and Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City.[12] Also, to help in our efforts, we need to build alliances, and develop trade connections, with the global solidarity economy and cooperative movements.

5. Temporal Scope

Much of what I propose is immediately practical because we understand how to develop cooperatives; they already exist. There is a strong solidarity economy and, at least on the small scale, this model can exist within the current system. What we need is more visibility, more capital devoted to cooperative development, and more policies to support cooperative business ownership. We also need more exposure to these models and more education about them. So, while we have the way, we do not necessarily have the will, or at least not the awareness. And we aren’t strong enough, yet, to engage in wide-scale implementation. All this is still somewhat idealistic. Realistically, we need twenty to thirty years to slowly develop more cooperatives, through conversions and bottom-up development, and to strengthen and widen the solidarity economy. We need cooperative enabling laws. But, as more cooperatives develop, we will start to change laws because people will better understand what they need to create a fuller system, and will demand more transparency and support for the cooperative solidarity economy.

Realistically, we need twenty to thirty years to slowly develop more cooperatives, through conversions and bottom-up development, and to strengthen and widen the solidarity economy.

6. Theory of Change

The theory of change behind this model of a cooperative solidarity commonwealth is that the more people that practice economic democracy, collective ownership, and economic transparency, the more they will come to expect to see these practices in the rest of their lives. People will work to make the changes necessary to enact this system. This is a model of change from the bottom up, based on practicing local economic solidarity and collective ownership. We spend at least eight to nine hours a day at work (spending more time at work than anywhere else each day). If we spend it engaged in economic democracy, we will transform our economic relationships and be more involved civically, as well as know more about financial choices, asset building, and collective decision making. More people will have skills to operate in, and manage, democratic workplaces. And they will expect, and work for, true democracy in all areas of their lives. More people will develop leadership skills and take leadership in economic, social, and political arenas. They will run for office in order to promote cooperative ownership and enact policies that will support the cooperative solidarity economy. More people will have prosperity, and this level of comfort will spill over into social and cultural benefits. Impediments include: financing cooperatives, reducing wealth inequality, and the undue influence and wealth of corporations and the rich. How will we reduce their influence and stranglehold enough to let these other activities flourish?

7. Some Specifics: Economy

(a) How are productive assets and businesses owned? Does ownership differ at different scales (community, nation, etc.)? Do forms of ownership vary by economic sector (banking, manufacturing, health care, etc.)?

Some of this is answered above. In the current solidarity economy, barter is relatively widespread and, where appropriate, would continue. Cooperative ownership and decision making by community residents will be the preferred ownership and governance structure. As explained above, the goal is interlocking cooperatives, second level cooperatives, and federations of cooperatives at regional and national levels, but no national ownership except for public banks and public utilities.

(b) How are public and private investment decisions made?

The investment model will focus on collective and cooperative investment through clubs and associations by community residents and community groups. Public banks and credit unions will be the brokers. Capital will be democratized as decisions about it are made through consensus by those who create and need the wealth.

(c) What is the role of private profit and the profit motive? Who owns and controls economic surplus?

This is basically a not-for-profit system, where economic activity and decisions will be based on need and supporting the public good. Using the term surplus, instead of profit, highlights that a viable business will create surplus but profitability is not the main purpose of economic activity. And the surplus—like the land, capital, machines, and supplies—will be owned and controlled by workers/ members for the common good. It’s a system based on people’s needs, not profit. Surplus will be used to enhance the common good, and ensure prosperity for all. It will eventually be illegal in this system to be a billionaire (to own excess wealth), and to charge excessive interest and rents. There will be wage and capital solidarity.

(d) What is the role of the market for goods and services? For employment? Other?

Markets will slowly become less influential, and pricing will be based on need, affordability, and the common good. Everyone will be paid a living wage with full benefits based on wage solidarity. And as owners, everyone in each collective enterprise would decide on what to do with the surplus. Enterprise-level decision making will be the major mechanism for balancing economic activity.

(e) What is the role of planning in your model? How is it structured? How, if at all, made democratic?

Democratic planning by workplace, with regional and national meetings of representatives by sectors and geography, will be used to coordinate individual enterprise planning at municipal, regional, and national levels. This is an approach that operates from the grassroots up, and the decisions, as well as policies, develop out of local participation, interests, and needs as much as possible. Good planning is essential, but coordinated decentralized planning is the goal.

(f) How are the international economy and economic integration handled?

Fair trade values and policies will operate. Another goal will be the elimination of multinational corporations, to be replaced by national and international federations of cooperatives and solidarity enterprises. There will need to be global inter-cooperation and international accords, particularly between secondary cooperatives and national federations, but also in the realms of business and industrial regulations, laws, and policies.

(g) How do you address economic localization, globalization, decentralization, ‘glocalization,’ and similar issues? Where is the primary locus of economic life?

As noted above, the primary locus of economic life will be at the local level, among grassroots community residents, who will then federate at larger municipal, regional, national, and international levels. But we do need to think globally while acting locally. There will eventually need to be global inter-cooperation and international accords so that fair trade abounds, and capital flight is reduced (if not eliminated).

(h) How do economic competition and cooperation play out?

This will not be a competitive system as competition is currently understood. This will be an economic system based on solidarity, nonexploitation, cooperation, and antioppression. In this system there will be healthy competition among colleagues, coworkers, and across sectors, so people will be encouraged to do their personal best, to serve their fellow cooperative members and citizens well, and to solve society’s problems. Everyone will be held accountable to the public good; competition will be about providing for the common good and solving problems in ways that benefit the most people in the best ways. With the profit motive mitigated or geared toward the common good, and without advertising and commercialization, traditional competition will decrease, if not disappear.

Everyone will be held accountable to the public good; competition will be about providing for the common good and solving problems in ways that benefit the most people in the best ways.

(i) Do commodification, commercialization, and the commons surface in your analysis?

Further development, and stewardship, of the commons will be essential. Community land trusts will be needed to diffuse speculative real estate. And again, a not-for-profit economy based on use and equity, with laws to support these principles, will be built. There is no room for commercialization or commodification, human need and concern for the common good will rule this economy.

(j) How is private property handled in your analysis?

Collective ownership, common lands, and community land trusts will be the preferred ownership models; stewardship of land will be the predominant value. Collective investment, as mentioned above, will be the preferred way to handle investment if there is still need for it. Community land trusts will be run by democratic non-profit community boards that own the land and the development rights of land. They will help to end real estate speculation and keep land affordable for renters and homeowners and in the hands of the community. Housing cooperatives and worker cooperatives will also be mechanisms for property ownership, and they will give communities access to public spaces. Some worker cooperatives will own collective vacation houses in addition to their own factories and stores, so the worker owners wouldn’t need to own their own individual properties. The notion of the commons and stewardship of the land, as well as democratic decision making about land, will gradually predominate.

(k) What mix of business enterprise sizes do you envision?

Small enterprises with 1000 employees or less, owned cooperatively, will populate the economy. Most will be small in size, with 100-250 employees, or even fewer than 100 employees. To start, there will still be a mix of capitalist corporations, but these will decrease and eventually become unwanted and unnecessary (and perhaps illegal), as the cooperatives and solidarity economy develop more and become stronger.

(l) How do you envision the future of the large corporation and what specific measures do you envision for corporate governance and control, internal and external?

Large corporations will be eliminated, as it will become illegal for small groups of people to own very large corporations (especially those with budgets larger than a medium-size municipality or state budget). The ratio of employees to board of directors will increase, as many corporations convert to worker cooperatives, decentralize, and operate more closely with their local communities. Instead of large corporations, federations and regional and national associations representing cooperative solidarity enterprises will develop.

(m) What role do you see for innovative corporate forms, coops, public enterprise, social enterprise, and public-private hybrids?

Exciting and innovative forms will coexist or be part of this new system. There will be room for lots of new forms of economic activity and business ownership, but the system will be based on solidarity economy values and on cooperative ownership. All forms will operate with similar values and principles of democratic ownership, including: shared voice, democratic decision making, grassroots ownership, antioppression, nonhierarchy, prosperity for all, and support for invisible work.

(n) What is the evolution of the workweek (hours worked, say, per year)?

The workweek will move from thirty-two to forty hours per week to twenty hours per week as the full-time standard that comes with living wages and full benefits. This system will employ more people and guarantee that everyone has a decent income. Work will include public works, community organizing, and labor that is currently invisible, such as childcare and in-home care of the elderly, so there will be enough work for all. And with profit sharing there will be enough money to pay everyone a living wage.

(o) What is the envisioned future of organized labor?

Organized labor will operate together with cooperative ownership (as it did back in the 1880s with the Knights of Labor). The Union Cooperative model will be expanded and unions will support worker-owners, helping worker-owners to focus on their needs and issues as workers, and balancing those with their needs as owners.[13]

(p) What are the roles of economic growth and GDP as a measure of growth in your system? What is the priority of growth at the national and company levels?

Growth will not be a priority, but need will be. Cooperative enterprises will grow and expand to address additional needs (and some opportunity). But instead of increasing the size of any one enterprise, there will be planned growth that includes increasing the number of worker-owned and community-owned enterprises rather than any one enterprise growing bigger. This will maintain wage solidarity and democratic governance among smaller units. Big will not necessarily be good. The Gini coefficient will be a more important measurement.[14] We will measure if everyone and every family is prosperous, has a place to live, can feed themselves, has good health, has leisure time and some disposable income, and is not discriminated against.

(q) How is money created and allocated?

Money will be created and allocated by credit unions, cooperative banks, and public banks—these financial institutions will use tax revenues to fund the development of the cooperative solidarity economy and thus expand the money system by enabling and expanding economic activity. They will practice non-extractive lending. They will charge overhead or fixed fees on loans rather than outright interest, and/or engage in profit sharing with the lender, which will increase returns and thus create new money, rather than the traditional model of earning interest on loans to create new money. [15] Community boards will govern these financial institutions and study ways to effectively practice non-extractive lending.

8. Some Specifics: Society

(a) How do you envision the future course of income and wealth inequality? What factors affect these results? How do you envision the future course of economic poverty? What factors affect these results?

As mentioned above, with living wages, joint ownership, wage solidarity, and strong anti-oppression practices, poverty and inequality will be eliminated.

(b) Are special measures envisioned to protect and enhance children and families? To advance the underprivileged? To promote care-giving and mutual responsibility?

Yes, these are included in the principles discussed above. Social cooperatives will also address these issues.

(c) How do racial, ethnic, and religious justice figure in your work?

Affirmative antioppression, and antiracism actions and policies, and non-hierarchical practices as mentioned in the description at the beginning of this piece, will be essential. We can’t have economic democracy in a racist and sexist society. So working on oppression, discrimination, and hierarchy within the economic democracy framework will be an imperative. It will also be part of the principles and purpose of the cooperative solidarity economy to eliminate oppression, racism, sexism, and hierarchy.

We can’t have economic democracy in a racist and sexist society.

(d) What role do gender and gender issues play in your work?

Gender inequality, sexism, patriarchy, and privileging certain sexual orientations are also oppressions this model addresses and will eliminate. We will not achieve economic democracy unless we address these oppressions and discriminations—and eliminate them. I consider myself a womanist, with a human rights framework for addressing sexism, patriarchy, and gender inequality.

(e) What, specifically, is the role of community in your model? What measures and factors affect community health, wealth (‘social capital’), and solidarity, and how central are local life, neighborhoods, towns, and cities?

Community will be central. This is a community-centric model, based on grassroots economic organizing, grassroots agency, and the assumption of power by grassroots community members, especially those who have usually been marginal, voiceless, and impoverished. All action and practice will start at the grassroots, from the bottom up. Its purpose will be to create community-level prosperity and wealth that is democratically controlled and distributed.

(f) Do you envision a change of values, culture, and consciousness as important to the evolution of a new system? If so, how do these changes occur?

Yes. A change in the ruling elites’ values will be imperative, but also, more importantly, we have to change the values of grassroots community members who do not know, understand, or practice the values of the solidarity economy. We must make this knowledge, these values and these practices more universal. With the new model, the aspiration will no longer be to be an elite. Thus, in the final version of this model there are no ruling elites. We will learn and show by doing—by practicing/engaging in democracy and economic justice. We will need more public education to expose people to this model and these values; and to teach people a new way of thinking and acting. The change in values, culture and consciousness will occur most, and best, through practicing economic democracy.

(g) What are the roles of the consumer, consumerism, and advertising in the system you envision? Self-provisioning? Sharing, renting, and bartering?

Public education about caring community, cooperation, and solidarity will be necessary. The solidarity economy includes bartering, gifting, and sharing in nonexploitative ways. The system will work for the common good, to cover all needs. So, consumerism and advertising will not be necessary and will be a waste of resources. Local control, people-based, community-owned goods, services, and enterprises will address consumer needs. Consumers are owners, workers, and community decision-makers as well. There will be no major difference or distinction between these groups, and therefore, no need to attract or engage consumers as a separate class, to be duped.

The point of the work will be to have time for caregiving, volunteering, and continuous learning. And participating in a democratic solidarity system will require continuous learning. The cooperative solidarity commonwealth will depend on volunteering, social energy, caregiving, and continuous learning; and the system will not prosper without these values and activities. It will be based on them to provide for the common good in ways that also produce economic outcomes. In other words, to create economic activity out of addressing the common good and common needs. So, the system will be about creating a society that gives back to the community, while continuously learning so it can do things better, and providing for all its members. The shortened workday (twenty hours per week) and democratic ownership and decision making will also increase time available for leisure, productive leisure, and community activities.

9. Some Specifics: Environment

In your work: (a) If your system addresses environmental concerns, how do you conceptualize “the environment”? Do you envision the economy as nested in and dependent on the world of nature and its systems of life?

Yes, the cooperative solidarity commonwealth will require a healthy natural environment and assumes that the economy is nested in, and dependent on, the natural world and its systems of life. Economic democracy, as explained here, will be sustainable for humanity and the ecology. Built into the system is an understanding that sustainability must include Mother Earth and all meanings of community. Environmental sustainability is in the definition and principles of a solidarity economy, as previously described.

(b) Do you address a rights-based environmentalism (e.g. right to clean water) and the idea that nature has legal rights? Do we have duties to other species and living systems? Are any of your goals non-anthropocentric?

This model does not specifically address rights-based environmentalism, but rights-based environmentalism is understood in the triple bottom line goals of solidarity economies, and my notion of a cooperative solidarity commonwealth.

(c) Do you envision addressing environmental issues outside the current framework of environmental approaches and policies (e.g. by challenging consumerism, GDP growth, etc.)?

The health of Mother Earth is implicitly necessary to this model, and the local community focus of economic activity is in part to help address, and ensure, environmental health and ecological sustainability.

(d) How do you handle environment-economy interactions, trade-offs, and interdependencies?

There will not have to be trade-offs once the system is in full swing. Both will be mutually pursued. If the economy is people- and community-based, then the economy will be dependent on the best interests of the community, and thus of the Earth upon which communities depend.

10. Some Specifics: Polity

(c) How does your model address questions of political and institutional power?

Power will be in the hands of grassroots community residents; equity requires ensuring that voice and power are given to the marginalized. Economic democracy is the basis of this model and democratic economic participation will be essential. Democracy and economic democracy are not possible without attention to white privilege, racism, sexism, and all kinds of exploitation.

(d) How does your model deal with problems of scale? How much decentralization does it include for large systems? How would decentralization be structured?

Decentralization will be important and supported, but partnered with democratic grassroots planning and federation (organizing municipal and regional representative organizations). Large will not be as revered as good, except where it is natural. The focus will be on interlocking local small systems, which federate and collaborate to reach (or benefit from) scale.

(f) At different political levels, what polity and what political conditions are implicit or explicit in getting to success?

More pure democracy and consensus building are the necessary political conditions for this model. They grow out of economic democracy and community-level justice.

(g) There is an ongoing critique of representative government and exploration of direct, “strong,” and deliberative democracy. Does any of this figure in your framework? If so, how?

Yes. But democracy will start in the economic sphere in this model. We can’t achieve political democracy without economic democracy. This system will focus on establishing and institutionalizing grassroots economic participation, democratic governance and non-hierarchical and non-exploitative relationships, that will then bubble up to other levels and other systems.

(i) How central is government in the future you envision, both in getting there and staying there?

Government will follow the lead of communities and democratic workplaces. Eventually, government will be controlled by members of the local cooperatives who will assert their leadership by engaging in legislative activity at the municipal, state, regional, and national levels, after learning democracy through practice in cooperatives and the solidarity economy.

(j) In the system you write about, what are the appropriate levels of government expenditure or government as a share of the economy and how are these levels achieved?

There will be a role for public resources and revenues to be used to support cooperative development. Education (public education in particular) about solidarity and cooperative economics, and strong policies to promote this model, will be necessary to encourage people to pursue and sustain the next system. Also, there will be a role for public banks to store public revenues and use them for the public good, and to support the cooperative solidarity commonwealth.

There is not true democracy without economic democracy, and the fight for economic rights goes hand in hand with the fight for political and civil rights.

(k) Do you envision social movements as important in driving political change and action? If so, can you elaborate on how this happens?

Social movements will need to direct change, but democratic economic practices will train and engage people so that they will constructively engage and act in social change. Economic democracy will be integral to sustaining, supporting, and sometimes initiating, social movements. In my book Collective Courage, for example, I find that the African American cooperative economic movement was integral to the long civil rights movement. Many African Americans realized that fighting for political rights was not enough, they also needed to practice solidarity and cooperative economics for survival, economic stability, and full liberation. Moreover, often without economic democracy and economic independence, those who struggled for civil and political rights were targeted, undermined, and retaliated against more effectively. So, there is not true democracy without economic democracy, and the fight for economic rights goes hand in hand with the fight for political and civil rights. In addition, I also find in Collective Courage that many African American civil rights leaders were first trained in the cooperative movement and/or practiced or advocated for cooperative economics. So that their civil rights work, organizing, and leadership (social movement building) were often forged in the cooperative movement or developed, at least in part, from practicing cooperative solidarity economics.

11. Real-World Examples, Experiments and Models

(a) Are there specific real-world examples or experiments you can point to that embody your model or system or exemplify important elements of your approach?

There are some examples that incorporate many elements of the cooperative solidarity commonwealth I describe. The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in Northern Spain, the Emilia Romagna region of Northern Italy, and the state of Kerala in India all are examples that include many of the elements of the model I described: small local worker cooperatives, interlocking systems, and networks of cooperatives supporting one another with strong financial systems and strong enabling policies.

Also, the five year plan of the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League in 1930 (during the height of the Great Depression) is another example of the beginnings of a cooperative solidarity commonwealth—but it was never realized.

The YNCL pamphlet outlined the five year plan:

Five thousand charter members, paying a $1 initiation fee, by March 15, 1931.

A council in each community where there are five or more members, that then establishes a weekly forum to discuss economic problems of the Negro and study consumers’ cooperation.

A cooperative enterprise where each council exists, by March 15, 1932.

A cooperative wholesale establishment in each state by March 15, 1933.

A cooperative bank in each community where there is a council by March 15, 1934.

Factories to produce such necessities as clothing, food, and shelter by March 15, 1935.[16]

(b) Are there other models that you see yourself aligned with or close to yours?

World Social Forum models of the solidarity economy are similar because they focus on grassroots, informal, nonexploitative economic relationships and activities. Other notions of a cooperative commonwealth are similar because they discuss interlocking and networked cooperatives. However, they do not connect as directly with solidarity economy values, and do not necessarily address race and other exploitations.[17] The Southern Grassroots Economies Project is beginning to put together a comprehensive vision to build cooperatives, especially worker cooperatives, in the South, based on racial equity and solidarity economy values.[18]

Notes:

[3] David P. Ellerman. The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1990), 206-207. The “new assets and liabilities created in production” in a worker cooperative accrue to the residual claimants (workers) (207). “The relationship between the worker and the firm is membership, an economic version of ‘citizenship’, not employment” – the employment relationship is abolished (206).

[4] The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation uses slightly revised cooperative principles that include: sovereignty of labour, instrumental subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, and social transformation. “Labour is the main factor for transforming nature, society and human beings themselves.” “Capital is considered to be an instrument subordinate to labour, which is necessary for business development.” “The willingness to ensure fair social transformation with other peoples by being involved in an expansion process that helps towards their economic and social reconstruction and with the construction of a freer, fairer and more caring Basque society.” See The Mondragon Corporation, “Our Principles.”

[5] Seventh generation thinking suggests that people live, work and make decisions for the benefit of people seven generations into the future. It is thought of as a way of life that centers on stewardship of the planet and a focus on ecological and environmental concerns. For more on the concept and its origins with the Iroquois tribe, see: Seventh Generation Thinking, “An Iroquois Perspective,” American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History, Christopher Vecsey and Robert Venables, eds. (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

[9] For example, Race Mathews explains this role of the early Mondragon credit union (Caja Laboral Popular) in, “Mondragon: Past Performance and Future Potential.” Paper in honor of the late Professor William Foote Whyte, to be presented at the Kent State University Capital Ownership Group Conference Washington, DC, October 2002.

[14] Gini Coefficient: “Measure of the deviation of the distribution of income among individuals or households within a country from a perfectly equal distribution. A value of 0 represents absolute equality, a value of 100 absolute inequality.” World Bank, “World Development Indicators 2013,” Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

]]>http://commonstransition.org/building-a-cooperative-solidarity-commonwealth/feed/017755Commons in the time of monsters: How P2P Politics can change the world, one city at a timehttp://commonstransition.org/commons-time-monsters/
http://commonstransition.org/commons-time-monsters/#commentsMon, 05 Jun 2017 08:43:49 +0000http://commonstransition.org/?p=17721Can Commons and P2P practices offer viable solutions for our present and future social, political and ecological crises? This is the story of how it's done.

]]>The Commons is maturing politically, its methods and principles becoming more visible and its participants winning municipal elections in a variety of European cities. How did this happen, and what happens next? First, a look at our present political context, and then some observations on the birth and trajectory of this new wave of commons politics.

How bad is our present political landscape? Let’s take stock. The crush of “lesser-evilism”? Check. Alt-right’s metastatic spread? Check. Once-radiant left options (like Syriza or Podemos) now tarnished, in part by their inability to make good on promises? Check. Overall, pretty bad.

The excesses of neoliberal capitalism may have finally eroded any remaining trace of its intellectual credibility. However odious, these excesses had become comfortable for many people, offering a false sense of security and predictable margins of action. Prolonged austerity politics and the pillage of the welfare state have left large numbers of people frustrated, hopeless, and angry, though, and the awakened right-populist movements have exploited this with alarming consequences. But without an apparent alternative, political engagement can seem limited to a pointless choice: scramble on loose rocks over the familiar but shifting ground of globalized capitalism, or hitch one’s wagon to a careening carload of 21st century hubris, i.e. Brexit, Trumpism, the alt- or far-right. Is it time to give up on the representative democracy experiment, or are there any active models for more humane, participatory politics?

The political context described above has been outlined in a good many contemporary books and articles, but sadly, there are seldom any viable alternatives offered to stem the tide of inevitable ruin. This article describes an attempt to reimagine our political systems emancipated from rollercoaster markets and bureaucracies. Based in existing, effective political movements that have been winning elections in a variety of locations, this is an account of radical innovations in governance, production, care work, the stewardship of our cultural, digital and natural heritage, and of a politics that lays a bedrock for bottom-up system rebuilding. This is the politics of the commons and peer to peer (P2P), an expansion on the shared creation and management of common resources, and its recent successful eruption in municipal governments.

Commons in the Time of Monsters

As Gramsci said (or didn’t say [1]), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. After nearly 40 years of progressive neoliberalization and social decomposition, contemporary politics has been very publicly upended by a misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged “new right” intent on coupling its politics of hate onto the apparatus of state power.

So, where is the margin for action, if change from within is effectively blocked by the structural constraints of statist politics and the electoral arena? The Leninist notion of achieving state power with or without popular consent, and as a certain precursor to equitable and lasting social change, has proven misguided: the next system won’t just fall into place at the pull of a lever.

Amid this increasingly bleak political landscape, affinity-based networks and communities using P2P dynamics and building commons have been taking action. Small-scale innovations in many fields are paving the way for true, sustainable resource management and grounded social cohesion. In governance, food growing, service provision, science, research and development, education, even finance and currency, these community-enabled developments demonstrate how differently our lives could be organized. Many of these place-based efforts are being documented and replicated worldwide through the Internet, in the process re-seeding the knowledge Commons from which they draw. This is done through commons enabling, aka P2P (peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to-people) technologies, which are gaining momentum as forces for constructive change. They enable small group dynamics at higher levels of complexity and enable the reclamation of power.

With this power, people can create innovations in production, open book accounting, and the stewardship of natural, cultural or digitally derived commons — but also in governance. Together, all of this forms the building blocks of a truly bottom-up system. Could all this really coalesce into something that, in the future, might be called “post-capitalism”? Only if those who identify as commoners recognize, promote and develop these systems and increase their cultural and, vitally, their political influence, while remembering that there are other players already on the field using similar means towards very different ends.

Prefigurative social arrangements and provisioning approaches are some of the key components for constructing sensible alternatives, but they are not developed in isolation. Instead, they are built within the constraints of existing systems. Likewise, whether through the enclosures [2] brought on by neoliberalism or through authoritarian, exclusionary hate politics, the ‘normal’ conditions people expect or aspire to will undoubtedly shrink. This would affect things people have taken for granted to some degree, including job security, pensions, unemployment, sensible working hours and conditions, fairness. As an effect, the ‘wiggle room’ assumed for the operations of those productive communities will inevitably compress.

Seen from outside the Western context, this wiggle room could be considered as ‘privilege’. Under the market-maximizing dictates of Brussels, such privileges seemed like they were on their way out in the EU. But the man behind the curtain was revealed in 2008, and a sudden flare of counter-political activity reached its peak of public attention in 2011. In 2017, the question is not theoretical, but hands-on practical: how do we build the new world in the shell of the old – and before the shell squeezes shut.

The post-2011 protest movements never quite got it together, politically speaking, well or quickly enough to counter the rising hate wave from the right. The contemporary European political landscape shows a populist reaction against global capitalism, but by harking back to a past that never was. Adding insult to injury, we see these xenophobic constructs have built their social base not just with deft internet and social media skills, but also by using P2P tactics. That’s a bit of salt in the wound, given that P2P tactics and tools have largely been promoted by people working for a more inclusive and just world, not one that seeks to “otherize” and exclude.

We cannot afford to forget that financial interests will always favor extreme right wing or fascist options that safeguard their stake, and that any redistributive political options will be harshly and publicly ridiculed, or worse. With the noxious spirit of the thirties rebounding, there’s not a moment to spare; patience now would be a deadly strategy. It’s time to occupy the collective cultural imagination with compelling and practical political alternatives and expose the normalization of neoliberalism as deadly propaganda; to expose the numbing spectacle (Brexit, Trump, etc.) as yet another synthetic opioid addiction.

This is why it’s time for the Commons movement to become more overtly politically active. Beyond self-organized production, care work, ecological stewardship, even beyond ethical generative markets, it’s time for more effective political engagement, not only to protect the essentials of the welfare state model, but to transcend it with a radically reimagined politics that facilitates social value creation and community-organized practices. There are models for this commons-oriented political engagement in Spain’s municipal movements, which the rest of this article will outline. To be clear, “political” describes not only political representation, but also the actionable rights of all those affected by political decisions – the public sphere. There’s a false dichotomy between wanting to build new alternatives now and wanting to enable change by hacking existing political channels. Both approaches, prefigurative and institutional, can work together.

Vanguardism: a 21st century cautionary tale

Now it’s time to look back at the origins of a particularly visible political party, one that offered the promise of a more inclusive, commons-oriented political process, but which eventually failed to deliver. The spirit of the commons was present in its nascence, though, in public assemblies. This factor is one to keep in mind while considering the eventual rise of municipalist parties.

In January 2014, a group of political science professors from the Autonomous University of Madrid found themselves gaining some popularity on Spanish national television. They announced the formation of a new political party, one that would demand:

“…a politics that goes back onto the streets that talks like the majority of people who have had enough. (…) Our demand for a greater generosity from representatives, for a greater horizontality and transparency, for a return of the republican values of public virtue and social justice, for the recognition of our plurinational and pluricultural reality is more real than ever. It is decades since our desire for making our own decisions and answering our own questions was so real.” (Mover Ficha Manifesto)

In the European Elections four months later, the new party won 5 seats in the European Parliament with more than 1.2 million votes.

Of course, that party is Podemos, whose trajectory indicates what a commons-oriented political party can — and more pointedly, should not — do. Their early months impart what is politically feasible in urgent circumstances, and show the power that can be harnessed by appealing to peoples’ hopes while articulating their needs and desires. The early success of Podemos is due to their work on two distinct-yet-related levels: mass media and network media.

Having cut their teeth on prime-time TV debates, Podemos’ most visible figures (chiefly male) made for great entertainment, clobbering the arguments of the chronic political class, which they dubbed la casta (“the caste”, a jibe implying a privileged class).

It wasn’t all show business. They were savvy enough to capture the networked, horizontalist politics of the 15-M movement. A staggering number of geographical- and interest-based assemblies (called “circulos”) were enabled and bolstered online through tools like Reddit, Loomio and others.

With its legion of tactics, Podemos became a totem appealing to many types. One type is the once politically apathetic actor, who sees in Podemos’ secretary general, Pablo Iglesias, a contrarian avatar through which to channel their disdain for the middle-class destroying “casta”. Next would be the old guard leftist, disenchanted with the Social Democrat (PSOE) party’s devotion to neoliberalism and austerity politics. Similarly, there are those who had been disillusioned after placing their bets on the more leftist outgrowths of the Spanish Communist Party. The last type, obvious but worth mentioning, is the activist, who found or rediscovered their political voice in the squares during 15-M and/or the preceding alter-globalization movement.

Of course, we’re not here to tell the story of Podemos. That story has turned darker and duller over time. Once high on the taste of popularity and leadership in the polls, the Podemos ruling committee slanted towards becoming a vanguardist “electoral machine”, taking power on behalf of those left behind. It began to look like Podemos would win the elections at all costs and bring liberation to the silenced masses — whether the masses wanted this imposed from above, or not.

Three years later, the results are plain to see. Surpassed by both the Social Democrats and the somehow-still-ruling Popular Party (a den of Franco apologists and Brussels bootlickers), Podemos failed to make “fear change sides”, as once they boasted.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, Greece proffers another cautionary tale: SYRIZA, the party from the “little country that said ‘no’”. Except that, after saying ‘no’, the little country’s political representatives, now disconnected from the social movements that lofted them to power, kept on playing the rigged game rather than build one fresh.

The story does not end here. A new political milieu arose between 2014 and 2015, led by the third profile mentioned above: the post 15-M activists, stepping up and into politics. They wanted to be the creators of representative politics, not its recipients, and to act as facilitators for many other voices to be included. The genesis of Spain’s municipalist coalitions tells a new story, describing keys to a successful commons-based political strategy that creates tangible change.

Proclamations of a movement’s death, greatly exaggerated

The origins of this other story lie in the apparent decay of the 15-M movement. The word “apparent” is key here – as long as we are speaking of visibility, we must acknowledge the Occupy movement as part of this disappearing act.

In 2011, Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” was not Donald Trump, but the protester. This marked the apex of media-visibility for the networked movements demanding attention by standing their ground and announcing their presence through encampments, which provided a compact mass of human profiles against a mainstream media-friendly backdrop. Here, we should draw a distinction between how the 15-M and Occupy encampments disbanded and were disbanded.

In Spain, the activists took a page from the Art of War and voluntarily dispersed their large-scale occupations, decentralizing them into neighborhood assemblies. In the US, the FBI coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, private sector players (notably banks), local law enforcement, and mayors of several prominent cities to first infiltrate and then violently dismantle the occupations. If we limit the import of Occupy to those few, highly visible months in the squares, we can see that it had not so much “died” as it was assassinated.

In both Spain and the US, the media — behaving as if geospatial proximity is the only thing holding affinity networks together— rushed to pronounce these and all their sister movements worldwide to be defunct. So much for the person of the year in 2011! This was not a natural passing but a brutal attempt at disappearing a large movement. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “proclamations of the movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated”. If these movements still live and breathe, though, we must ask ourselves with whose complicity and consent they have been labeled “failures”.

Think of a sugar cube. Held in your hand it is compact, with a recognizable shape and texture, easy to measure and describe. Drop the sugar cube into a cup of coffee and stir that around. Magic! The cube has disappeared. Take a sip, though, and you’ll agree that the flavor has changed.

In a nutshell, this describes the argument that the 15-M/Occupy/Syntagma/various local movements are alive and well, albeit in distributed and less immediately apparent ways. For those willing to look, their effects are readily identifiable. Remember that not even six years have passed since the occupations; this is not a tale of hippies turning into yuppies. This is the story of a movement that refuses to take the news of its own demise as a binding contract.

In the US, you can perceive how Occupy infused the Bernie Sanders campaign (also undermined by entrenched interests), and recently we can see its influence in the Women’s Marches, strikes and parts of the anti-Trump movement.

In Spain, however, these activists, people with real memories and lived experiences, chose to politically organize, and they actually won – not once, but multiple times in multiple locations.

The Rise of the Urban Commons

In the spring of 2014, spurred on by Podemos’ success in the European elections, a group of activists met in el Patio Maravillas, one of Madrid’s most prominent occupied social centers. “We’re going to win this city”, they announced. They began organizing, enabling unprecedented levels of citizen participation and facilitating a common space for previously unaffiliated and disaggregated political actors. Anyone who agreed with the basic principles and wanted to be present could propose him or herself as a candidate on fully open and participatory electoral lists.

A month or so earlier, activists from Barcelona launched a manifesto to invite existing social movements and political organizations to converge around four fundamental objectives:

Guaranteeing the citizenry’s basic rights and a decent life for all,

Fostering an economy that prioritizes social and environmental justice,

The participative democratization of institutions,

To meet an ethical commitment towards citizens.

The call for convergence was an astounding success, and Guanyem Barcelona, publicly represented by anti-eviction and right to housing campaigner Ada Colau, begins its yearlong mutation into Barcelona en Comú, an “instrumental” electoral coalition comprising a variety of actors from social movements and anti-establishment political parties working together to take back the city.

Ignored or decried in the popular media, these coalitions, much like the 15-M and Occupy encampments, replicated themselves in other locales, forming alliances and swarming around shared values and beliefs. The process was messy, effervescent and busy. No one had tried this before and there is no instruction manual; in practice, it can only be written together.

Against poll expectations, a hostile media, and entrenched political interests, these parties overwhelmingly won in Spain’s main cities, not only Madrid and Barcelona, but also in Valencia, A Coruña, Zaragoza, and Cadiz. Podemos, although a participant in many of these coalitions, chose to run the regional (as opposed to the city) ballot on their own. The result? Zero victories in all the places where the citizens’ coalitions had triumphed. In the city of Madrid, where the same census group could vote for the city (Ahora Madrid) and regional (Podemos) ballot, Podemos got just half the number of votes won by Ahora Madrid.

Spain’s municipalist coalitions were the result of a number of movements representing changes in cultures, mindsets and relations to power. The most notable among these is 15-M and, unlike Podemos, the coalitions can be considered its true political byproducts. Prior to the 2014-2015 electoral cycle, 15-M had also developed strong transversal relations with movements around housing, public health and education and culture. Known as “las mareas”, or “citizen’s tides”, these were characterized by self-organized protests and capacity building that, although inclusive of traditional actors such as labour unions and political parties, were truly multi-constituent in nature. For example, the public health marea would include healthcare professionals, patients, civil workers, health reformers, hospital staff, specific disease-focused associations and help groups, etc., as well as all supporters of the public health service. 15-M itself was also a product of already existing tendencies, with people who had been working in digital activism, free culture, de-growth, the commons and a host of other movements.

Today, the municipalist platforms coordinate among themselves to share resources and best practices, functioning as trans-local affinity networks. Although mainly focused on providing real world solutions to their constituencies, the coalitions share a number of notable features. One of the most refreshing is that their attitude towards political discourse is considerably more feminized, a contrast to the old guard and masculine attitudes typically found in institutional politics.

The municipalist focus on participation and radical democracy, honed through many street assemblies, has been refined into a shared “código ético” or ethical code, which shapes the platforms behaviors within the institutions. The code acts as both a glue and draw for the participants, again not limited to party staff, but to all who want to feel involved. The main features are as follows:

No revolving doors (no cycling through public/private positions)

Salary cuts

Participative program

Open primaries — no party quotas, and open to anyone

Voluntary/citizen self-financing, and rejection of institutional or bank financing

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local alliances, all the municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in order to form a network of “Rebel Cities”. This, as a practice, mirrors the locally embedded but globally networked practices of P2P productive communities. In addition, the multi-constituent approach seen in the citizen tides is mirrored within the coalitions, which, although inclusive of established political parties, are notably non-partisan as they all reflect the interests of wide breadth of civil society actors.

And they lived happily ever after? Of course not: the activists-turned-political representatives face an unwaveringly hostile media environment, which exaggerates their blunders (or invents them when convenient) while burying their achievements. After four years of precarity and engaged activism, these individuals face 60+ hour workweeks while clashing against the entrenched realities of horizontalist bureaucracy, holding minority seats within electoral alliances with Social Democrats. The pluralistic nature of the citizens’ coalitions have unsurprisingly led to incoherencies and gaffes and, perhaps worst of all, a noticeable abandonment of direct-action tactics and counter-power building efforts. Still, they soldier on, and the list of benefits and advances (cancellations of public contracts with multi-nationals, participatory budgeting, more gender-balanced literature and representation, increased public spending, anti-gentrification strategies, basic income pilots, direct-democracy mechanisms…) is plain for all to see.

The best of the truly good news is that Spain’s municipalist coalitions are not alone. Progressive cities worldwide are enabling and empowering the act of commoning. Rather than directing what the citizenry can do for itself and its environments, these “Rebel Cities” or, “Fearless Cities” as the upcoming event calls them, are listening to commoners’ voices and creating spaces for ordinary people to roll up their sleeves and manage those matters that concern them most directly. Cities like Ghent, Belgium; Bologna, Italy; Amsterdam, Holland; Frome, England; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Naples, Italy; Montreal, Canada; Jackson, USA; Lille, France; Bristol, UK and Valparaiso, Chile are examples. Their people are increasing transparency, enabling participatory budgeting, turning empty lots into community gardens, co-creating skill and tool sharing programs, and facilitating the creation of social care co-ops among many other actions relevant in their local contexts.

Beyond the city level, we now also find pan-European efforts to bring the practices of commoning to the institutions, while not losing sight of the necessary mutual recognition needed for the Commons movement to emancipate itself from markets and state as it radically re-imagines these. In November 2016, a group of 150 commoners from all over Europe gathered in Brussels to lay the foundations for a united and strong movement, and the European Commons Assembly was born. Building on several weeks’ collective work in policy proposals, the Assembly sat in European Parliament to explore the ECA as a platform and the commons as a powerful paradigm for policymaking.

Commons Transition: Building the political lexicon of social governance from below

The lexicon and practices of commoning are evident in how these coalitions, Rebel Cities and transnational assemblies have formed and are articulating their governance. With a focus on transparency and citizen participation, and taking advantage of open-source P2P technologies, they prefigure many aspects of the politics of a better future. The challenge ahead lies in applying the network logics that have been so successful in Spain to recover the latent power of Occupy and 15-M and build resilient, more feminized and ethically coherent, transnational political movements.

In the same way that prefigurative strategies incorporate social and environmental priorities into their informal constitutions, without waiting for markets or state to deal with such ‘externalities’, the municipalist ethical code can form the kernel of a set of political guidelines to be hard-coded into commons-oriented coalition principles, bringing fresh accountability to contemporary politics.

Potential success is also about keeping it real and relatable. The old left has traditionally communicated in abstracts, which tends to create rather than solves problems. At the same time, the “new” populist left of Syriza, Podemos and Bolivarian Socialism seems satisfied making grand paternalistic promises, resorting to throwing blame rather than proposing participatory, unalienated and feasible actions. In a culture where the elderly self-organise affinity groups through social networks and informal, participatory communities emerge to address the shortcomings of a decaying welfare state, people are demonstrating that they want to have a say in how things are run. They do not want to have someone paid exponentially more to say it on their behalf. Can a Commons politics address and support this shift towards self-organization?

The vision is to develop the emerging commons and P2P political movement at higher levels of complexity — the regional, national and transnational levels — while preserving the characteristics of local, real-place dynamism. By engaging the creativity and input of those communities most affected by political processes, commons-based practices can nurture a sense of identity that can be harnessed for effective political action. The integrative narrative of the Commons invites citizens’ direct political engagement outside the restrictive bureaucracies of the market state and economies.

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities, while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” — would also take on new functions derived from already existing P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real, needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops, mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-Commons partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation, parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy — to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and real time consultation of political and legislative issues and budgeting. In issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid facilitator to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that keeps it in check.

Is this narrative Utopian? No more than the “what are their demands…?” proposals of Occupy and 15-M. In fact, many of the Partner State practices described above are already being enacted by the Fearless Cities. Accusations of utopianism are used dismissively to enclose the commons of the imagination. People need courage (and encouragement) to imagine something better in human nature, more than inevitable conflict and self-interest. History, despite its observable patterns, is not deterministic. Nothing suddenly materializes from detailed concepts into fully formed realities; there was no group of wise men sitting around in 15th century Florence proclaiming: “…and we shall create Capitalism! And it will progress through creative destruction! And we shall have high frequency algorithmic trading!” or any such nonsense. Instead, if we look, we can identify various socio-technological trends including the rise of the merchant class, the printing press, double book accounting, all of which would proceed from the 18th century to form what we recognize now as “capitalism”.

Back in our present-day chaos, applying a Commons Transition to the field of politics entails creating a new, inclusive political narrative that harnesses the best practices of three distinct progressive trends: Openness (e.g. Pirate parties), Fairness (e.g. New Left) and Sustainability (e.g. Green parties). The optimal game plan for building a new political vision fit for the challenges of our time involves building bridges between these three trends, precisely what the municipalists have achieved and translated into political and legislative power.

This vision for a new politics must also promote other underplayed concerns such as race, gender, and reproductive justice, and radically diversifying political representation in response to increased interest in balance — at the least, being sure that the representative picture is not always and only straight, white men, particularly in leadership roles. Take into account that women spearheaded the municipalist candidacies that triumphed in Barcelona and Madrid.

There is a need for deeper respect towards rural and deindustrialized areas, where P2P dynamics can usher in workable solutions and grounded, bio-regionally based political engagement. Inclusive by nature, the Commons as applied to politics can enable grassroots political participation by affected individuals and communities. However, this new narrative must be grounded in scalable, existing best practices that are accessible to change makers and civil-society organizations, not only to existing institutions.

Taken together, these successful municipalist occupations of power structures show that the logic of the Commons, coupled with democratic, participatory relations enabled by P2P systems, can reinvigorate and instill a new sense of purpose in today’s political field. If we can imagine a commons-oriented future including a commons politics, it practically becomes a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring that better future to reality. In this fight in the time of monsters, the fight between David and Goliath, why not be David?[3] He won after all and, after seeing what the municipalists had to overcome, perhaps so can we.

Footnotes

[1] Did Gramsci actually say that? This hotly contested quote nonetheless captures the current world juncture.

[2] From 1776 to 1825, the English Parliament passed more than 4,000 Acts that served to appropriate common lands from commoners, chiefly to the benefit of politically connected landowners. These enclosures of the commons seized about 25 percent of all cultivated acreage in England, according to historian Raymond Williams, and concentrated ownership of it in a small minority of the population. These “lawful” enclosures also dispossessed millions of citizens, swept away traditional ways of life, and forcibly introduced the new economy of industrialization, occupational specialties and large-scale production. Nowadays we use the term “enclosure” to denounce heinous acts such the ongoing privatization of intellectual property, the expropriation and massive land grabs occurring in Africa and other continents, the imposition of digital right management digital content, the patenting of seeds and the human genome, and more. This modern tendency towards enclosures and turning relationships into services, and commons into commodities, has been described by Commons scholar David Bollier as “The great invisible tragedy of our time”.